The Death of a Beekeeper

by Lars Gustafsson

  Panic! Pants on quick, the heartiest thanks, and now the only question is, dear Mr. Jansson, whether you could possibly be so kind as to drive us—to Virsbo or to Västanfors—but, by the way, which of the two is closer?

  —Ah so, to Västanfors? But dear Mr. Jansson, you have already been so kind, really, and now you even go so far as to drive us all the way to Västanfors. You have just got your new wood-burner operating as I heard?

  Uncle Sune crept out to the petroleum shed and gassed up the Plymouth.

  The trip was just as pleasant as the whole afternoon. Uncle Sune was in his very best mood, the cigarillo was nimbly swinging up and down his Nietzsche mustache, and by the time they got to the Alcoholics’ Institute at Sundby, he had virtually finalized a special allocation of textiles for his store from the Gas Rationing Bureau. Triumphantly the car drove up in front of the old town hall of Fagersta, where a melancholy reception committee cheered up somewhat when they caught sight of the gentlemen in the back seat. They were the councilmen from three communities, gentlemen from the provincial legislature, and from the Road Administration, and the Västanfors Police Chief.

  The gentlemen climbed out and expressed thanks for the ride. Simultaneously someone discovered that the wood-burner was missing. It simply was not there! Either Uncle Sune had forgotten to connect it in his haste or more probably the silly thing had torn loose on the trip.

  He was just as genuinely astonished as all the others.

  —Well, my goodness, said Sune, where is my wood-burner?

  The car puttered along merrily on empty, but no one—thank God—had enough presence of mind to notice that.

  —We must have lost that piece of shit on the way, said Sune.

  But how in heaven’s name did we manage to get here? asked the Road Administration Director.

  —Really, that’s very simple, said the Secretary of the Provincial Government, with the full weight and the considered knowledge of higher bureaucrats. There were such enormous slopes.

  —But we drove up those slopes, the Road Administration Director observed quietly. Dammit, we were driving uphill the whole time.

  —Well, it’s always the same old shit, said Uncle Sune, but with a certain reflectiveness.

  (The Yellow Book III:30)

  Always the same old shit. While one attended elementary school, high school, the teacher’s seminar, one was channeled step by step into a finer language. And into a more abstract one. One was only too willing to learn it. In high school one could tell the difference between children from lower-class homes and children from the middle-class homes. The children whose parents came from lower-class homes had a tougher, less illusion-prone language. I had the same experience when I became a teacher myself.

  A view from the gutter from which all motivation for all actions became hard, egotistical, cynical.

  The language of the middle class: the most insecure of all. It starts from the premise that in order to reach a higher level in the social hierarchy one has to act as if one had already arrived there. That creates a peculiar insecurity in the whole system. One knows the meaning of words, but not for sure.

  For example, for several months now I’ve been “scared shitless.” In another language one would call that fear of death. Fear of death gives the matter a completely different dimension, as if a higher intuition were present when one says “fear of death” instead of “scared shitless.”

  I don’t see that this higher dimension exists.

  Nothing has shown me as clearly as the experience of the last months that society has an unconscious. That may be attributed to the fact that fear has freed me from all the languages which I was once taught in order to protect myself. I am beginning to see with the terrible clarity of my boyhood period, with its anxious clarity.

  The unconscious of society. The experimental animals, slowly tortured to death in laboratories, rubber tubes inserted in their neck veins and stomachs, cancer cells planted in the livers of live dogs with long, thin syringes. The waiting rooms in the neurological clinics, the thin, trembling alcoholics at Storborn in Västerås.

  All the time a terrible price is being paid. But to whom? And for what? What has been paid up to now for my existence?

  . . .

  Now so much snow has already melted away that the wet stones, the molded leaves of the previous year become visible everywhere.

  I have always imagined paradise as being dry and hot, never moist.

  In paradise there are no lies.

  (The Blue Book III:5)

  Four completely pain-free days. Uffe and Jonny were here again yesterday. I read them my horror story. They were not as impressed as I had imagined. They were of the opinion that it was a good beginning, but that there had to be a lot more action brought in. We discussed various continuations. Will the heroes make it to the tower on their own power and destroy the pain-causing ultrasound organ, or will they need some kind of help from outside?

  Should they try to surround the tower? Should one man sacrifice himself in order to divert attention? Can one avoid these pain-causing sounds by plugging one’s ears with wax?

  Uffe has a bandage over his whole forehead. He had gotten an ice hockey puck on one eyebrow.

  They had brought their magnifying glasses and sat a long time on my steps trying to set some shoelaces on fire. But the spring sun is much too weak still.

  They entertain and distract me very much, these little fellows. They are so unproblematical somehow.

  (The Yellow Book III:31)

  Something is happening just now about which I hardly dare to speak, out of fear that mentioning it is going to make it untrue again.

  The pains disappeared twelve days ago. Often I feel somewhat tired, somewhat dizzy, but that could just as easily be the normal spring fever. I have been to the store four times to do my shopping.

  Then was it, after all, perhaps nothing so bad? A kidney stone? Kidney gravel that has been passed? These symptoms actually correspond very well to kidney stone symptoms.

  Incidentally, kidney stone pains are considered to be among the severest possible. Stronger than labor pains, it says in an old issue of Scientific American.

  I have decided to wait another week before I begin to hope.

  (The Yellow Book III:32)

  When I myself was small or still the same age: the strange, somewhat stuffy sweat smell of the gym way up under the roof, the pull-up bars around the walls, the feeling of wanting to do things for which one didn’t have enough strength, of being a man and a boy at the same time. And that almost vegetative semisleep during the classes back then during prepuberty, the way one sat there playing strange games with one’s own fingers, trying to interweave them in various ways, as if one were sitting in one’s own brain weaving about in it: in order to understand its labyrinths.

  I thought for a long time that this strange, sleepy condition had something to do with the monotony of school, but that’s not true, I suppose.

  Now I experience the same thing again: it is as if vitality had been slowed down, as if it were preparing for a big change.

  In my case that is because I have the crisis of an illness behind me.

  The peculiar, quiet melancholy of boyhood.

  Apparently I’ll have to live through this age anew.

  (The Yellow Book III:33)

  4. Interlude

  (no notes whatsoever for thirty-three days)

  April 6th. The pains are beginning to go away. Now only emptiness.

  (The Damaged Notebook IX)

  April 8th. All day long the barking of a dog could be heard, who must be new in this neighborhood. It comes from the south, terribly complaining and monotonous. Perhaps it is on a chain?

  My problem: Although I don’t have any pains anymore, something else is tormenting me instead; I’m beginning to hope and at the same time I don’t dare to hope because they can recur at any time.

  I think a great deal about one thing: since this letter which I burned, the Distric
t Hospital hasn’t said a word. If it really had been cancer, logically they would have written again when they didn’t hear from me; it is clear, after all, that they keep track of their patients. So it was a trifle, some inflammation. An inflammation of the diaphragm?

  But what if they simply misfiled me?

  I have begun to avoid the mailbox.

  (The Yellow Book IV:1)

  April 9th. Hope is almost as difficult as the other. But one is simply more used to hoping and fearing than to find oneself in the middle of what one had hoped or feared.

  What I have learned: that there is no real escape from life.

  One can only postpone the decision with cunning and cleverness. But there is no way out. It is a totally closed system, and at the exit there is only death. And that naturally is no exit at all.

  I am a body. Nothing but a body. Everything which has to be done, which can be done, must happen within this body.

  (The Yellow Book IV:2)

  I’ve been thinking about Paradise, of all things. I also started to sand down the front door, it needs a new coat of paint, the old coat peeled off during the winter and hangs down in shreds. Surprisingly, I found three cans of paint in a kitchen cabinet, they must have been there since the early sixties, since I was married.

  Paradise opens up interesting problems. What is an infinitely continuous state of happiness?

  One thinks of an orgasm naturally. An orgasm, a big, wonderful orgasm, which suddenly surprises one by not stopping. It goes on minute after minute, hour after hour. It is so intense, so white hot, that one cannot think, but one feels that something tremendous is taking place, one begins to long for a tiny pause, only a fraction of a tenth of a second, to be able to reflect, but this tremendous pleasure simply continues, it continues hour after hour . . .

  Paradise? I experienced all that recently.

  Paradise must consist of the stopping of pain. That means, however, that we live in Paradise as long as we have no pain! And we don’t even know it.

  Happy and unhappy people live in the same world, and they don’t even know it!

  I have the feeling as if during the past months I have been walking around my own life in a fantastic, mysterious maze, and now I have returned precisely to that spot at which I began. But, since I moved outside the normal dimensions, right and left somehow got exchanged. My right hand is now my left one, my left hand my right one.

  Returned into the same world and see it now as a happy one.

  The shreds of peeled paint on the door belong to a mysterious work of art.

  (The Yellow Book IV:3)

  I should have used the time better than to fritter it away as an elementary school teacher at Väster Våla and now to raise bees here in voluntary early retirement.

  Table of art forms according to their level of difficulty

  Eroticism

  Music

  Poetry

  Drama

  Pyrotechnics

  Philosophy

  Surfing

  The art of the novel

  Glass painting

  Tennis

  Water colors

  Oil painting

  Rhetoric

  The art of cooking

  Architecture

  Squash

  Weight lifting

  Politics

  High trapeze

  Parachute jumping

  Mountain climbing

  Sculpture

  Bicycle acrobatics

  Juggling

  The art of aphorisms

  Building fountains

  Fencing

  Artillery

  One I cannot fit in: the art of bearing pain. That has to do with the fact that up to now no one has been able to make an art of it. We are therefore dealing with a unique art form whose level of difficulty is so high that no one exists who can practice it.

  (The Blue Book IV:1)

  A World Dominated by Truth

  On Planet Number 3 in System 13 of Aldebaran there is a civilization which, without the use of symbolic connections, deals directly with reality.

  The idea, for example, that a figure on a sheet of paper can represent something other than itself is completely foreign to the unusually strong, many-segmented centipedes which represent the highest level of civilization on the planet.

  That they are strong is their good fortune. Since they know no other symbol for an object than the object itself, they have to drag a lot of things around with them. On this planet the expression “a powerful rhetoric” really has meaning.

  If one wants to say, for example: “A stone warmed by the sun,” there’s only one possibility. One puts a stone warmed by the sun in the hand or better said, in the paw, of the person with whom one is speaking.

  If you want to say “A huge stone on the peak of a mountaintop,” there’s only one possibility of expressing this sentence. Namely, that of dragging a huge stone to the top of a mountain.

  Under these circumstances the creation of a lyrical poem becomes a test of strength which will continue to exist for generations in all of its heroic clarity.

  Most of the sonnets created by this civilization look approximately like Stonehenge: gigantic, ceremonious rows of stones, which the heroes of prehistory, groaning and moaning, with bulging veins, erected according to an ancient design.

  In this civilization lies are, of course, something totally impossible. If one wants to say “I love you,” there’s only one possibility, namely doing it. If one wants to say: “I don’t love you,” there is also only one possibility, and that consists of avoiding doing it. If one can.

  In a world where the symbol invariably coincides with the object and, therefore, no object can ever be represented by ridiculous little sounds or a series of ludicrous little signs on a piece of paper, signs which, taken precisely, have nothing to do with other things, except in our fragile, haphazard social conventions. In such a world truth will coincide with sense, lies with nonsense.

  In such a world the only substitution for a lie consists, naturally, in talking so confusedly, so nonsensically, that one cannot make oneself understood.

  Normal conversation, chitchat, is conducted in the following manner on this planet. The inhabitants take a variety of tiny objects out of leather pouches they carry around: glass balls, little stones of various colors, prettily polished wooden sticks, and exchange them with each other.

  The price of truth is high. Of all the highly developed civilizations in the region of the old central suns in the center of the Milky Way there is none which lives as isolated as this one.

  Naturally one cannot think about astronomy. One doesn’t talk about galaxies if one has to move them in order to name them. Even the concept “planet” is, naturally, totally inconceivable.

  These beings live on a reddish plain surrounded by high mountains.

  For this plain itself, which theoretically is the same as “the world,” they, of course, have no concept.

  (The Blue Book IV:4)

  When the pains stopped fourteen days ago, that was a return for me into a kind of original paradise. But the precondition for this was the pain. It was a form of truth.

  Just the opposite of Uncle Sune’s “always the same old shit.”

  Now one could create something like values again.

  (The Blue Book IV:8)

  Everything went well. The relatives came on Tuesday, they had even more children with them than I had feared, took over the whole house, every spot, with sleeping bags, blankets, and provisional junk.

  They were of the opinion that I looked a little pale, the women found the house a bit run-down, too many coffee cups with these impossible dry grounds. Nonetheless, it went well.

  No one noticed anything unusual.

  They stayed one day less than I had feared. Possibly I had a childish terror that the pains would begin again just because they were there.

  Nothing else happened, however, other than I got a little tired.

  I notice that I no
longer like to be disturbed in my habits. On Wednesday, for example, the two little boys came by, got frightened about all the goings-on in the little house. I saw them disappear shyly behind the fence.

  And I haven’t even managed to write a new chapter for their horror story.

  Naturally, I had imagined that this terrible organ, whose ultrasound produces pains, should be blown up in the next chapter; it would be revealed that this flute had very remarkable characteristics. It would be able to play away the whole spook.

  Now I have to let the thing rest for a while. I hope they will come again. They are, so to speak, the only literary public I have.

  I felt throughout a kind of curiosity about the reactions of the Manngårdhs, didn’t dare, however, to ask as many questions as I actually had wished.

  Do they see me as a completely normal relative, at whose house one stays overnight instead of spending money for an expensive hotel on the way to Sälen, or do they consider it their duty to look in on me? It became clear to me that it has been a long time since I really gave a damn what the world thought of me.

  I have not been able to discover anything really asocial about that besides the fact that I no longer demand the usual standard of living. I live without any income, which is very easy since I have no expenditures either.

  Jan and I talked about old acquaintances. Our talk turned to Troäng. He knew him, after all, since he had been dealing with similar matters in the provincial government in Västerås. That whole scandal with the leukemia cases in northern Västmanland and with that special ecology commission.

  Neither Manngårdh nor I had the slightest idea what he is doing now. A year ago there was some kind of rumor that he had joined the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross in Barkarö, but that kind of rumor arises inevitably in his circumstances. It is difficult for me to imagine him as a strict, ascetic member of an order. In contrast to me, who had actually always been a quite ascetic type, he was fairly sensual by nature.