The Death of a Beekeeper

by Lars Gustafsson

  One could see that in his school period, for example, in his relationship to girls.

  What Manngårdh and I discussed was actually much more interesting. We talked about how this type of bureaucrat—naturally only if he is sensitive enough— sooner or later has to burn himself out, because he simply absorbs too many of the inner contradictions of society, he internalizes them.

  That doesn’t always have to take the extreme manifestation of Troäng who, in effect, vomited the entire conflict at the end of the affair when he was interviewed jointly with the Prime Minister on the evening television news.

  One can sometimes detect it in the disquiet in their eyes. It ruptures as a stomach ulcer or expresses itself in a sudden exhaustion, in a divorce, but it does break through. One cannot live with too strong inner tensions, and these people internalize, after all, the aggregate conflict of society, attempting to live on both levels of communication.

  After they went away, it became clear to me how interesting it is that Manngårdh of all people had brought up this matter. He is, after all, actually employed by the Employment Administration. Hopefully they were lucky in Sälen.

  Troäng: something like that would never happen to me, since from the time I was an adult I have always had such a clear feeling of standing apart, of being basically asocial, even though I have always paid my taxes. Since the argument about the old age pensions I have not participated in any election.

  Even my way of reacting to the illness is, naturally, asocial.

  (The Yellow Book IV:12)

  M. had a funny characteristic: she liked to lie about little things. Never any great deception; I was able to deceive her in significant matters for years if I really wanted to. She lied only about little things.

  She might say that she had been shopping in Gamleby, while in actuality she had made her purchases in Fagersta. She might say that she spent a lonely evening weaving, while it was totally apparent that she had spent it weeding the strawberry patch.

  I thought about that a lot until I came to the solution, which was really very simple:

  With these little lies she created a realm of freedom.

  Although this had no practical implications, it naturally made me somewhat insecure not to know in which store she had indeed been, and that gave her a small amount of control over me. Thus a realm developed in which she could make decisions without limitations.

  That’s naturally in no way an insinuation about her character, but it only shows that I—without knowing it—must have held her at a terrible distance.

  Why is it that I don’t want to have anything to do with people?

  Because I don’t want to give them any kind of control over me. But they have that anyway! Internal Revenue Service, Citizen’s Registration Office, certainly. But much more the passions which are locked in my own body, because there already the others begin.

  For example, the erotic disquiet (which is now gradually returning since the pains in the stomach are going away), this dull, indefinite hunger, this feeling of lacking something, which, whether awake or asleep, pursues us in almost every moment of our lives.

  What is it? The possibility of love in our bodies. The presence, the possible presence of another human being.

  The humiliating, constant reminder that loneliness is not possible, that such a thing as a lonely human being cannot be.

  That word “I” is the most meaningless word of the language. The dead point in the language.

  (Just as a center always must be empty.)

  (The Yellow Book IV:14)

  I have decided not to call up M. It took me over two months to come to this decision, didn’t it. I am really beginning to be a bit slow.

  (The Yellow Book IV:21)

  I am of the opinion that the soul is spherical (if indeed it has any form at all), a sphere, in which a faint light penetrates just a little ways below the rainbowlike shimmer of the surface, where sensations and reactions of consciousness whirl about like soap bubbles, constantly changing their color, but it’s only a very little ways.

  Deeper inside there are only feeble traces of light, approximately like those in very great ocean depths, and then darkness. Darkness, darkness.

  But not a threatening dark. A motherly darkness.

  (The Blue Book IV:9)

  Recently I have repeatedly had a peculiar dream. It is about one of the beehives. I take off the cover and begin to brush off the frames in order to take out the hive. I am about to brush a bee off the edge of the frame when I discover that it looks odd somehow, shimmering blue, as it were. At first I don’t grasp at all what is going on, then I look closer and notice that not one of the bees is a bee.

  They are a totally different species. Some very intelligent, technically tremendously advanced beings from the farthest reaches of the universe, from a distant galaxy. They have simply taken over the beehive—heaven knows what has happened to the regular bees, but these beings appear to be used to living in cells similar to wax cells.

  They converse with me without the slightest difficulty, and I simply don’t quite understand how that is possible. They stem from a civilization of intelligent insects. Their entire planet has been destroyed by an exploding supernova, they have no spaceships, but fly their own bodies at the speed of light when they wish. In the earth’s atmosphere they are not able to do that, however, because this would produce too great a buildup of heat.

  Their brilliant glossy armor shines like knights’ armor. What are they saying?

  WE BEGIN AGAIN. WE NEVER GIVE UP.

  (The Blue Book IV:10)

  5. When God Awoke

  About the way a small spider naps in the corner of the web it has built, God was napping for twenty million years in a distant nook of the universe.

  That region was sparsely populated with galaxies. Nothing disturbed her sleep. She was hovering there like a giant jellyfish, thirteen parsecs in diameter, marvelous to look at with her continually changing pink, green, and deep blue color tones, which shimmered beneath the transparent surface of the umbrella.

  To the entire endless universe, which stretched out for light-years in all directions about her, she lent a kind of freshness. Even though she was not palpable, a traveler still could have felt her presence, just as one feels it when approaching the coast from the interior on a sunny summer day, or when walking carefree through a fresh spring rain, letting the water run over one’s face. She lent the empty space a unique feeling of freshness, of young green, yes, of being in love.

  But during those twenty million years no traveler came into those distant regions, which were not only far beneath our optical horizon, but also lay far beneath our broadcast horizon.

  For this wonderful and unique being, who was older than the universe and alien to time and space, who was both older and younger than all creation, larger than the entire universe and smaller than the tiniest elementary particle, twenty million years of sleep meant less than sleep. A moment of absence, just as when a motorist takes his eyes from the street for a moment in order to consider something.

  When the highest being again turned her attention to the world, all perceptions were still the same. The deep, pulsing noise of periodic radio broadcasts in the next galaxy was the background for an endless multitude of more delicate sensations. The soft energy changes of the suns came and went like the wind in the leaves of an aspen woods, and like the dull pounding of waves on a wharf at night the gravitational collapses of dying supernovae reverberated from distant regions.

  And as the highest of all frequencies, about like thousands of crickets and grasshoppers on a meadow, the thoughts from all inhabited worlds.

  Among all these sounds there was one tone, a very distant, very faint one, which at first she did not even perceive. But in spite of all its faintness and minuteness this sound was so penetrating that it aroused her attention once she had noticed it. Just a moment earlier it had not been there. It was so plaintive that it sent a tremor through the gigantic body of some
thing which, in human terms, could be characterized as motherly concern.

  God had heard the prayers of human beings.

  Three days passed before humanity noticed what was going on.

  The first person to notice the change was a fifteen-year-old guerrilla soldier in a jungle area just south of Tanzania. He and his starving, dehydrated troop, with long, ulcerous scars on their legs, had just been discovered by a helicopter as they were trying to hide in the shade of a solitary cluster of trees in the middle of a steppe flooded with merciless noonday light.

  The boy lay trembling next to an ammunition case, watching the helicopter approach. The muzzle fire of the machine guns was clearly visible already. In another moment he would die. He had been raised in a Christian mission. Seeing the helicopter approach and hearing how the dull, clattering noise of the rotor blades was drowned out by the harder clattering of the automatic weapons, he let a thought slip from himself:

  God, destroy them!

  The white flash, which turned the helicopter and its crew into a mass of strongly ionized particles driven away with the wind in a cloud, could be seen as far as the horizon.

  The second helicopter, which was already approaching, crashed a few kilometers away with a shattering noise. The shaken crew groped about helplessly, blinded by the tremendous burst of light.

  God, put an end to this, prayed a cancer patient in a hospital. The effect of the morphine was wearing off, and the glowing white pulsing pains in the lower righthand part of his stomach, right above the loin, were returning, becoming stronger with every pulse.

  At this moment the pain stopped and was replaced by something which seemed like a deafening silence. In his stomach area he felt only a faint pull, as if some hard object that had been pressing him there had been removed. He could breathe normally again. Five minutes later he attempted with immense care to pull up his leg.

  After another five minutes he pressed the nurse’s bell like crazy. When the night nurse came through the door very belatedly he was standing in the middle of the room with a shy smile.

  Give us, oh God, a lasting peace, the Archbishop of Åbo concluded his radio morning service. He said it in a deep seriousness and really meant every word he spoke.

  Had he spoken this prayer but a tenth of a second earlier, he would have remained a common bishop, albeit an archbishop.

  But since he spoke precisely at that special moment, he became a figure of world historical significance, yes truly the greatest figure of world history.

  Three tenths of a second after the Archbishop of Åbo had said the word “peace,” the control personnel in one of the huge subterranean rocket silos forming a chain in Outer Mongolia discovered that all of the ingenious instruments which control the condition of a rocket with multiple warheads—they can drop six hydrogen bombs simultaneously on six different cities—pointed to zero. This led to desperation, alarm, emergency measures. After six hours of hard work a team of specialists could conclude only that nothing could be saved. The eighty-meter-long rocket in its deep silo consisted from top to bottom of tremendously heavy, wonderfully glowing 24-carat gold. Soft, malleable, solid gold.

  It took one more day for the world to discover that the same was true for all fissionable matter on earth and not only fissionable matter. Every weapon, every projectile back to iron-age swords in the museums had in the same instant been turned into gold.

  At six p.m. the next day three members of the National Security Council of the United States, heavily sedated with psychopharmaceutical drugs, were transferred to a private psychiatric clinic. The remaining members observed their departure from a window on one of the upper floors of the Pentagon. They had the vacant gaze of people who don’t want to see or hear anything more.

  The first of the tremendous stock market crises, which within two days was to lead first to the dissolution of the money market and then to the dissolution of all finance, of every financial obligation, had already been rocking the stock markets of the world for ten hours.

  The fall of the price of gold was, at first, enormous. Toward noon it had sunk to the price of a ton of coal in the year 1934.

  The chaotic flight to the U.S. dollar, which started concurrently, had by one p.m. driven the price of the dollar to 12,340 ounces of gold. Within the next half-hour as a result of an unconfirmed rumor there was a panic run on Norwegian kroner, which within twenty-five minutes reached ten thousand times the value of the opening market.

  In a special T.V. bulletin at two p.m., the president of the Norwegian National Bank announced in somber tones the news of national bankruptcy.

  The television broadcast had only a very few viewers. For at this time, the citizens of Norway were engaged with private discoveries of such enormity that national bankruptcy left them totally indifferent.

  For thousands of years the prayers of some people had been very precise, very exact, whereas the prayers of others had been so vague and inexact that their wishes were articulated only in their dreams.

  In northern Västmanland, between Ångelsberg and Ombenning, an old, retired lumberyard worker was sitting in his little house leafing randomly through the Vestmanlands Läns Tidning of the previous day. He was on the verge of dozing off. His eyes were blinking into the light, the flies were humming through the room.

  A discreet knocking on the door gave him a start. When he opened his eyes, murmured a subdued “Come in!” and then saw six perfectly dressed waiters bringing in huge baskets of freshly cooked crabs in dill, caraway cheese as large as tractor wheels, carrying crates of icecold brandy, he accepted that with equanimity and concluded that he had, in fact, fallen asleep.

  The first cymbal and the sound of the small flute gave him another start. The waiters had disappeared.

  Arrayed in a shimmering blue transparent garment, the first of the five dancers began the dance. Her fantastically mobile navel circled under heavy jewelry hanging between her firm, small breasts. She smiled an infinitely inviting smile.

  With firm steps the lumberyard worker went to the door and locked it. On the way back he noticed that the rheumatism in his left knee had disappeared without a trace.

  At this point in time billions of people all over the world made the same discovery. The god who had so surprisingly begun to hear their prayers didn’t seem to possess any kind of moral compunctions, not a trace of decency. The power which was able to transform the giant projectiles laden with atomic weapons in one fell swoop into towers of gold soon showed itself just as willing to change the wrinkled wife of an elderly lieutenant colonel into a beautiful blond young man or to drown the nursery of the Social Welfare Department on Appelbergsgatan in Stockholm with a hurricane of Strauss waltzes and popping champagne corks.

  The whole world was bustling with an apparently immeasurable army of eager servants, who would suddenly appear in order to provide every human being with everything he had secretly wished for. The thronging, the dancing, the public copulation in the streets of Europe was indescribable on that second day. Sporadic, vague radio reports from neighboring continents revealed that similar conditions had broken out there.

  It was fascinating to watch the collapse of the church or, rather, of the churches. In the middle of the third day, approximately at the same time that His Majesty the King announced that all political parties had refused to assume the burden of government, approximately at the same time that Moscow and Washington announced that all official activities had ceased and the Communist Party of China announced the beginning—as scheduled—of the utopian phase, the missive from the Bishop’s Conference, which had been anticipated for several days, was made public.

  It was a masterwork of careful formulation. It began with the declaration that God’s ways and the depth of nature were impenetrable and no one could dictate to the Almighty what means He should use.

  Further it was hinted that there was also a demonic power in the world, and a true Christian must always decide in his own conscience which prayers were in accordanc
e with the will of God.

  Even if this beginning of a new era in history were proof of God’s goodness and omnipotence, the Bishop’s Conference must not fail to point out the new temptations which this change, which certainly would not be perpetuated in all eternity, had, of necessity, to bring to every good Christian. In this period marked by tremendous upheaval, the Bishop’s Conference saw itself compelled to admonish believers to be extremely circumspect in their prayers.

  These words were spoken to the wind.

  For the first time in its existence mankind had become familiar with a completely new kind of generosity, the boundless geniality, the indolent, yes completely nihilistic love of all creation which only that being can foster which has created it.

  One can also express it this way:

  Humankind, tormented for thousands of years by the strange and unhappy misconception of having a demanding and virtually inimical father figure above it, had recognized its error within a very few days.

  Instead there was a mother.

  As the human situation rapidly began to defy linguistic description and approached a realm for which there are no words, the DEATH OF LANGUAGE began.

  One of the last speech fragments contained the message:

  IF GOD LIVES, EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED.

  (The Blue Book V:l)

  6. Memoirs of Paradise

  Birch wood. Swampland. The first sign that the trees are beginning to put out leaves. How terribly quickly winter has passed! I’m not sure whether I want the springtime yet at all. I am not yet ready for it. Loneliness grows in me like compost. The strangest plants shoot out of it. Doubt.