The Death of a Beekeeper

by Lars Gustafsson

  There was something, after all, which one could hope for every morning on awakening, and every evening on going to bed one was again and again just as expectant about whether the night would be free of pain. Occasionally, periods of two, three, up to four days passed during which I didn’t feel anything at all in this peculiar place in the right loin.

  The pain dramatized the fact that I have a body, no, that I am a body, and from this fact that I am a body, a peculiar consolation, almost a security, could be drawn, almost like a very lonely person draws security from the presence of a pet.

  This pet was very problematic and especially toward morning rather resembled a wild animal, but, in any case, it somehow belonged to me, just as the pain belonged to me and to no one else.

  But now I’m beginning to wonder what I have let myself in for, when, for instance, I burned that letter without opening it.

  What I have experienced today during the late night and in the early hours of the morning, I simply could not have considered possible. It was absolutely foreign, white hot and totally overpowering. I am trying to breathe very slowly, but as long as it continues, even this breathing, which at least in some very abstract fashion is supposed to help me distinguish between the physical pain and the panic, is an almost overpowering exertion.

  A far cry from a pet now. A terrible, unheard of, white hot, impersonal power is taking its residence in my nervous system, occupies it to the last molecule and tries to explode every nerve into a cloud of blinding white gases, as in—in the corona of the sun (the whole night I thought about sun protuberances, the way they pulse, the way they break forth in cascades on the surface of the sun).

  I recognize that I took the whole thing too lightly. I did not take it seriously enough, just like everything else in this life.

  But this comes from outside! My God, where does it come from? And what incredible secret powers a poor, suffering nervous system can produce, powers which are exclusively directed against me. Against me, of all people.

  Now it has become somewhat better again. For the past few hours it has really been better. But I still have a cold sweat, and the pencil shakes in my hand when I try to write.

  I hope, no, I am absolutely certain that it will never come back, certainly something has been destroyed, so absolutely destroyed that it will never hurt again.

  But perhaps it will return in just a few hours?

  What I experience is total dissolution, total confusion.

  Up to now I never really grasped that the possibility of experiencing ourselves as something clearly defined, ordered, as a human self depends on the possibility of a future. The foundation of the entire concept of the self is that it will continue to exist tomorrow.

  This white hot pain, naturally, is basically nothing but a precise measure of the forces which hold this body together. It is a precise measure of the force which has made my existence possible. Death and life are actually MONSTROUS things.

  (The Yellow Book III:23)

  “Asta Bolin didn’t claim to know an answer to the question whether suffering has a meaning. The topic of the lecture had been formulated more to beg the question.

  Nonetheless, she had many valuable words to offer, words of consolation, words of meaning.

  She told how once, when a friend in a deep state of grief experienced absolute meaninglessness, she, in her inability to deal with the situation, said some words which were a genuine help to him. These words were: ‘Everything takes on that meaning which we ourselves give it.’

  Asta Bolin didn’t want these words taken as some kind of philosophical or other kind of truth, but she said they indeed expressed something very essential: that one can approach one’s grief actively, that one can work on it.”

  (The Yellow Book: A newspaper clipping from the Vestmanlands Läns Tidning, March 10, III:26)

  Bogs. Swampland. Slow, lazy waters fanning out into many small channels. Birds taking to the air hastily in a single cloud when one approaches them. Gentle winds wrinkling the deep, brown water. Clouds.

  I spent a large portion of my childhood summers south of the woods, near the ironworks of Ramnäs.

  It is strange, but always when I need consolation, not a fleeting, casual, but a deep consolation, a consolation which tells you that nothing will be better and that you must nonetheless feel consoled—then this region comes back to my mind.

  And everything is a single sound of flowing water, almost everywhere. From the black whirlpools of the locks at Färmansbo down to the strangely sad, bird-rich swamp areas on Lake Norra Nadden.

  The fish swarm which stands totally still in the shallow water and disappears with lightning swiftness when a shadow falls on it.

  In the little river Kolbäcksån somewhere between the lakes, my father and I almost drowned once when we tried, on a day very late in November 1943, to row across it in order to buy some butter at a farmer’s. It was an old brown rowboat of the kind used by farmers—but only south of Lake Åmänningen, where the bottoms are smooth as glass from the algae which grow on them, in other areas the boats aren’t as flat-bottomed—in such a boat one can break his neck if one doesn’t pay attention moving around, and besides that it leaks like the devil.

  The boat we had borrowed leaked terribly, much more than we had anticipated, and we had to keep taking turns bailing like crazy, with aching arms, before we landed at the last moment on a mud bar on the other bank. The water was ice cold and my hands were completely blue.

  Little though I was this bailing process appeared to me, I now think, to be a symbol of life.

  The black market played an enormous role in my life as a small boy. I had the impression that we were constantly about on evening expeditions to buy butter without ration cards or to purchase pieces of a moose.

  For the past three days the pain has been flowing more weakly. It is as if it had gotten through some terrible waterfall, and as if we had now reached a kind of backwater again, in the black, lazy eddies on the other side. Yesterday I went walking again a little bit. I didn’t dare to drive the car, I feel a little too weak for that, but since Sundblad is here over the February vacation and knows that I am not particularly well, my shopping has been done for me every day at the grocery store. I only wonder how things are going to be when the Sundblads are gone again. Probably I’ll get back on my feet. Deep down I have the feeling of having withstood a kind of crisis: I just feel pretty wrung out. I am telling myself, whether rightly so or not, that it’s something like a tumor that had to rupture and has ruptured, and now that it has, I must automatically be on the way to improvement. I hope that that is true.

  In any case it must have cost me a lot of strength. Whatever happened last week. Whatever it was. All morning long I wondered whether I should put the ladder up to the attic to take down a couple of frames for the beehives which have to be sanded and newly varnished. Then I would have had something meaningful to do; this writing just makes me more depressed. But having considered the matter all morning long, I came to the conclusion that I simply couldn’t do it.

  Perhaps tomorrow.

  The clouds have always been low over this swampland and mirrored in the water, in the channels.

  In those summers—particularly in the summers of the forties—I sometimes had the feeling of walking under a roof. As if I had gotten into some complicated trap.

  Then, in the forties, there were still those farmers’ kitchens with huge, white-chalked ovens. On every holiday they would be whitewashed with a new layer of chalk, with the years they must have grown with all those additional layers of chalk.

  It must have been next to such a huge, white-tiled, warm oven that my father and I ended our adventure that time. I still recall the taste of the thin coffee, tasting almost burnt, which we used to drink then.

  On the crest of one of those high hills on the west side of Lake Åmänningen, where at that time an old, steep gravel road led from Fagersta to Virsbo, my Uncle Sune had a store.

  A green house with
a gasoline pump in front of it, a large, red gasoline pump of this truly fascinating kind with a glass bowl on top in which one could see the yellow gasoline turn a screw. In the forties, naturally, there was no gasoline in the pump, but it looked snappy anyway. On the upper floor my uncle lived together with his unbelievably fat wife, Ruth, whom one never saw outside; I believe she even had difficulties getting down the stairs to the store, where she presided with a tremendous, somewhat blood-spotted butcher apron in front of her round belly.

  The store was completely brown inside, brown walls, brown counter, from the brown counter a brown cord extended out of a hole, which someone must have made with a crowbar. That was long before the time of plastic bags. A meat counter made out of glass, where several greenish slices of liver were floating around in an indefinable organic liquid. In the back a small room, in which Uncle Sune counted ration cards half the night long, the glasses with the steel rims pushed up on his forehead, in the yard a shed with petroleum, hardware, several of the strictly rationed bicycle tires, and other small items.

  He always smoked, small, brown cigarillos, and since he had a little mustache of a model similar to Nietzsche’s or Stalin’s, one was always somewhat concerned that this mustache would catch fire as the cigarillo stub glowed down slowly like an old-fashioned fuse.

  Perhaps he had yet other similarities to Nietzsche as well. He was an individualist. He wouldn’t let himself be impressed. In discussions about wartime events, which would take place in front of his counter while he was running back and forth with the cigarillo stub in the corner of his mouth, a pencil stuck behind each ear, and a scissors for the rationing cards tied to his belt with a string, always in a hurry, he would take the stub out of his mouth for just a second to whisper:

  —It’s always the same old shit!

  “It’s always the same old shit” was almost for him a kind of motto, a response which he utilized in all somewhat dramatic moments.

  He had a truck, a Volvo, with a wood-burner in one of the sheds in the yard behind that house on the gravel road. Sometimes the car ran, sometimes it didn’t. It took hours to cut the wood for the burner, little pieces of a special shape, which one hacked out of round pieces which had been prepared with a broad-toothed saw. It was hellishly tiresome to prepare the fire in the burner, it was a real test of patience until the gas began to flow as it was supposed to into the various channels and cavities of the peculiar high pot behind the driver’s compartment. Sometimes it really started to burn in there, and then one had to get to the nearest lakeshore immediately—there were many, thank God—and pour water over the whole apparatus. And the cylinders were always sticky and smeared with dark-brown tar.

  But he absolutely needed the car to get flour and sugar and milk cans and strange things from Västerås and Kolbäck, which could only be transported by night.

  Uncle Sune dealt in a lot of things. He did that, by the way, until late into the sixties, but by then, of course, he had been in the construction business for a long time and belonged to those who got state loans for rental property. This property would then be thrown up, covering whole fields in Hallstahammar and Virsbo, and rented to Finnish industrial workers for exorbitant prices; their houses sprouted up in that region the way mushrooms do from the moist Västmanland loam. But that is, actually, a completely different story. At that time he was already in Västerås in an eighteen-room villa with a swimming pool and a copper roof and called himself a contractor.

  But this was in the forties.

  In the summer of 1940, Sune located three large barrels of first-class gasoline. He got them out of Norway of all places, I don’t know how that was possible, but probably he traded something else for them.

  The motor of the truck was too run-down to have it pay to convert it again to a gasoline engine, but he still had his old Plymouth, a prewar model, which had been on blocks for two whole years in the shed of a neighboring farm.

  He dragged it home with two horses and spent a Saturday and a Sunday putting it back in shape. The motor hummed like a cat on the excellent German airplane fuel which, in some inexplicable fashion, had managed to get over the Norwegian border, which at that time not even refugees could cross.

  Naturally, it was quite clear that he could not, without further ado, travel around with normal gasoline. That would have brought him behind bars in the shortest possible time. His neighbors were envious and grudging enough already.

  Almost every one of them, even though he had given them credit for months. To say nothing of all sorts of shady deals with the valuable ration cards, deals which he would always let go by unnoticed. This ingrate pack that was always slandering him. Always the same old shit!

  He found an auto repair shop near Sörstafors which had a wood-burner for sedans. They installed it on a small trailer and connected it to the car by means of a complicated system of hoses, pipes, rods, and ball joints. The wood-burner was completely covered with rust and damaged by fire, but it still had one quality: it could roll on wheels.

  Uncle Sune bought it as scrap for five crowns, brought it home on the truck, and spent an entire weekend painting this monstrosity silver bronze. As long as one didn’t scratch the paint, it looked fantastic.

  The car ran like clockwork on this gasoline, and the burner hobbled behind on the trailer as well as it could. Naturally it slowed the speed a little, but otherwise the car drove just like a prewar vehicle.

  Uncle Sune traveled around half of Västmanland, enjoyed his new freedom of movement in great measure, drove his plump wife to a cinema in Västerås, and found life comfortable all along the line. This was a period, by the way, in which business was fantastic.

  The old country road between Virsbo and Fagersta was not in particularly good repair. Today an asphalt road goes right across Uncle Sune’s farmyard, nothing remains of the green grocery store, the only reminder of the old place is an unusually beautiful, old ash tree, which in some wondrous way has withstood the caterpillar tractors and explosions and now bends over the right lane.

  Every time I drive by I think of those times. And every new spring the ash puts out leaves.

  They are strong trees, the ashes.

  The old road would have bad potholes in the middle after the wood hauls of the winter. In early spring it could happen that an entire piece of the left shoulder (I always see the landscape from north to south, but I am used to the fact that most of the time we would travel in the other direction) falls into Lake Åmanningen, and then warning stakes of the highway department announced in glowing red colors, here one must be careful. There were unbelievable slopes, the longest of which was certainly five kilometers long, a veritable paradise for every bicycle rider coming from the north, and a nightmare for those coming from the south.

  The new street is almost completely flat. In these mighty chains of hills, the foothills of the Landsberg, it runs through tremendous incisions created by blasts, and the old, reed-covered swamps in the Lake Södra Nadden region with their wind-wrinkled channels, their wild ducks and mysterious labyrinths of lazy, black waters, have been filled up partially with thousands of wagonloads of the fill material from these explosions. The landscape has been turned inside out.

  Perhaps this landscape has lost its soul. Perhaps it is only hiding it. I believe that one day it will return.

  Be that as it may: at that time, in the spring of 1942, or 1943, the road was in terrible condition, and after an exchange of letters lasting about half a year, the two communities of Virsbo and Västanfors got the provincial government in Västerås to make a road inspection.

  The gentlemen from the provincial government started early in the morning in two completely full cars, running, as might be expected, on wood-burners. At the intersection north of Virsbo the deputation met with the representatives of the Virsbo community (I am going by the account in the Vestmanlands Läns Tidning), who joined them in a third car.

  So it was an exceptionally felicitous demonstration that the last car, occupied b
y the Road Administration Director and the Secretary of the Provincial Government, who also held an equally high position in the Rationing Bureau, broke its axle three kilometers south of Uncle Sune’s hill. Together with two assessors of the provincial government, they had to wade through the early spring slush until they came to Uncle Sune’s house. It was an additional misfortune that they had been at the end of the column when the calamity occurred, and the people in the two other cars had apparently not noticed it.

  They stomped through the slush, carrying on a lively discussion about whether they ought to go in the direction of Fagersta or return to Virsbo, and in the middle of their debate the Secretary of the Provincial Government caught sight of Uncle Sune’s red gasoline pump on top of the hill.

  In the meantime sweat was running down his red face, and his woolen scarf, which he had put into his pocket, dragged like a train behind him. Thank heavens one of the assessors had relieved him of his briefcase.

  Uncle Sune knew the Road Administration Director as well as the Secretary of the Provincial Government through the Vestmanlands Läns Tidning, and for a moment he paled. Had one of his more profitable business doings in recent times been perhaps a trifle too daring?

  When he saw the condition they were in, he calmed down again quickly and under the Stalin mustache smiled his most winning smile.

  Soon the gentlemen were sitting in their underwear at a coffee table on the second floor, while next door in the kitchen Ruth was working on their pants with a steaming-hot iron. The conversation revolved around the terrible condition of the road, truly a car broke its rear axle every other day, and around the difficulties a poor merchant had in this time of crisis with the calculation of the ration coupons, and of course the gentlemen understood, between us, Mr. Jansson, it simply isn’t that easy to sit in the Gas Rationing Bureau and perhaps a small, a very small cognac would be in order?

  It was tremendously pleasant, and it could have gone on like that until far into the night. It was completely clear to the Road Administration Director that the street had to be asphalted with all possible speed, at least to this truly nice little store, and everything was peace and joy, until one of the gentlemen chanced to cast his gaze upon his watch.