One afternoon the ship stopped.
Help! Lifeboat drill, I thought, and cursed the zealous first mate. From my hideout, I had heard him trying to teach Svenson the Morse code. He even used my quick ability to grasp things as a worthy example. I nodded in agreement. Svenson couldn’t even tell the difference between a dot and a dash most of the time. The first mate could have tired of those lessons by now and turned his attention to the crew, wanting to get the men involved in new activities.
I shut my eyes and waited for the lifeboat cover to be ripped off. Then my skinny-but-still-not-eaten body would be revealed before the congregation’s astonished eyes among the remains of my thievery.
But nothing happened and nobody appeared.
The ship seemed deserted. I peered out. A ship moving forward in open sea is familiar and secure. But stop the engines and let the ship roll in whatever swells the sea offers, and the ship turns pitiful. Worse than I felt when I saw my shipmates in their finest ashore clothing, standing at attention on the astern deck, waiting for the captain. I understood that I was going to witness my own funeral.
Naturally, there was no body to wrap chains around. The bosun had no nose to put the last stitch through after sewing the sailcloth shroud. But the steward had thoughtfully contributed a Christmas tree from cold storage, and the kitchen staff had artfully arranged the branches into a wreath with silk ribbons and written messages that waved farewell. A short piece of chain was fastened underneath the wreath so that it would sink in place of my already presumedly consumed body.
The captain’s words were brief and vigorous. The desolate wind carried them to my ear. He described me as a curious and gutsy young man. When the flag was lowered and the wreath slipped into the water, at least my eyes were not dry. So much bother on my behalf.
Below the lifeboat, on the lifeboat deck, stood Else behind Allen in the wheelchair. She sobbed beautifully while he irritatedly asked her to stop. Else found it absolutely terrible. I had been “just a little boy.”
Not so little, I thought. Disappointment, jealousy, and a perfectly normal question pained my chest, as I was lying low in the lifeboat.
What would have happened, had we not been interrupted? Would Else have been able to call me a little boy afterward?
Questions flitted about as uneasily as lost souls. But ghosts did not exist in my head only. Many aboard the ship felt there were unearthly visits. I roamed around just about everywhere, thinking that perhaps it would be good to be discovered. One evening I went astern, to my own cabin. It was empty. I wasn’t there. On the bunk was my worn cardboard suitcase with the lid open. Inside the lid the first mate had glued a list of my belongings, witnessed by the bosun. I recognized that trick. A good system. Then one can be absolutely certain.
Furthest down on the list the first mate had noted one Ridgway’s tea container with three stones, rather large. Worthless, he had added in parentheses. A gutsy little man he was, and very neat, too. But obviously he had never seen opals in the rough. I took the container and sneaked back up again. My thought was to put it on the boat deck so Else would see and recover it. After all, she was the legal owner. But things did not happen that way.
Later that evening I was awakened from my dreams in the lifeboat by agitated voices. Else and Allen were having a heated argument. The stiff breeze tore their sentences into small pieces so I never heard any distinct words. Suddenly the chain running along the deck underneath the lifeboat clattered. I managed to stick my head out on the same side. There was a free fall to the water under the lifeboat. I could do nothing. With full speed Else pushed the wheelchair with Allen in it over the edge.
Since he was turned toward the ship, I could see his face. He looked perfectly content.
Else wavered close to the perilous edge like someone intoxicated. Desperately I pulled at the lashing that held down the lifeboat cover. Sometimes it took me endless minutes to open and close it so well that no observant eyes could detect any loose pieces of rope. I bent and twisted trying to get out quickly. I even called out. Too late. Else was already suspended in air and soon disappeared.
I will never understand why both of them longed for the bottom of the sea.
So this is the story of how things turned out when I tried to visit a bordello in the fair city of Port Adelaide.
The opals in the tea canister?
I snuck ashore in Genoa and sold them for three hundred and fifty billion lire. I got a false passport as a bonus. That was OK. But the money did not even cover a train ticket home. It was counterfeit and of no value whatsoever.
ALGERIA
1976
Louise was magnificent. Toward sunset she drove up in a four-wheel-drive Landrover. To the best of my knowledge, she had no driver’s license. I rushed out to shop, picking the ultimate luxury-food items the place had to offer: lamb cutlets, wine, salad, a can of condensed milk, and “la vache qui rit” cheese cubes.
My hospitable Frenchman was away. We had the house to ourselves, but still we ate among the spiny bushes next to the cracked pond. Some children were drumming stubbornly on tin cans, and the hard contrasts between light and dark melted and merged in a warm blush before everything was shrouded in the blackness of night. I wanted to paint her face, without shadows and with that precise softness, as if rosy childhood skin had been magically restored. Louise had gained a few pounds. She looked healthy and strong. She was also calm and collected in a way I did not recognize.
I introduced my friends and patients, the turtle and the schizophrenic dog. The dog presented the greatest problem. Running around in the neighborhood, he had received so many beatings that friendly words and fingers scratching his fur actually seemed to intensify the attacks of violence. He crawled on the ground, wagged his tail, snapped at the air with drooling jaws, and tried to keep his eyes closed at all times. I took his unwillingness to look me in the eye as indicating feelings of shame. It would be possible to get a wedge into the mind of the big male beast, if only I could isolate him from his surroundings. The other day I drove off a small boy gleefully throwing rocks at the dog. The boy’s mother appeared and misunderstood the situation totally. She removed one shoe and began to bang it on the boy’s head. His head started to bleed. The boy screamed. The mother’s frenzied, shrill voice scared off the dog. I tried to stop her, but by then we were surrounded by other women and children. In a matter of seconds, I would have been the main course for the incensed females.
Luckily Omar appeared, and even he had difficulties in toning down the rage. He voiced the informed opinion that the women were upset because I could be seen among children and dogs in the middle of the day. I ought to hang around a café like other men.
‘Omar,” I asked. “Why do you beat your dogs? And why do you hit your children, as if they too were dogs?”
“It’s simple,” answered Omar. “Children and dogs — it’s the same thing. We hit them to teach them obedience. The day we are old and have no strength to hit them, the memories of the beatings are so strong that they obey anyhow.”
Omar smiled. He was proud. In his universe everything had its preordained place.
The evening progressed with both Louise and me, in spite of everything, succeeding in avoiding the shadows that existed behind us. I was careful to discuss neither the present nor our future. Instead I proudly related my latest method for repairing turtles and showed the old shapeless creature with new plastic padding stripes in the cracks made by the dog’s teeth. Louise wondered what would happen if the turtle grew. I had not thought of that. I had always seen the turtle as ancient. I promised to chisel out my mending fillings.
Then I asked the turtle to tell a tale from Adelaide. It just stared stupidly with watery eyes, pulled in its head, and could not be bribed even with fresh pieces of lettuce. The effect was the desired one, though. I managed to awaken Louise’s curiosity.
I told her the truth. With nothing else to do, I was attempting to find myself. It was slow going. I had never formulated o
ne single opinion about my own person. I was unused to doing so and experienced feelings of embarrassment. But since I was far from my former place of work and consequently had all the time in the world, I might as well do what she had urged me to do. In other words, I had tried to speak to the turtle about my life. Unfortunately I got stuck in Adelaide.
“What happened in Adelaide?” asked Louise.
I told her.
We drank wine while the North African night enveloped us and a glowing moon rested on the rooftops. I laughed a little at myself as a comical figure while sorrow and a feeling of loss groped around inside me, trying to get into the light, as if other memories were pulling me down into a well of pain. My desperate tries to sneak the distorted mirror image of our relationship into the story did not ring true. But behind all the garbage, we both existed, I and Louise, if only she would listen. If only she would smile and think of the two of us and when we really met.
HOW IT ALL STARTED
or
First Encounter with Louise
Up to the time I met Louise, my life was a torrential rapid of events and happenings. This is how the last bit went.
I do everything too late. It was the same with the military service. I was forgotten and never put on the rolls, but I managed to muddle into the military life anyhow. To my consternation, I was placed in a secret elite unit of the navy. The first few months were rather fun. We shot holes in cardboard figures, cut straw dolls into pieces, dynamited tree stumps, broke into indicated places, and learned to do a multitude of things blindfolded.
One day we were to learn dog defense, meaning the art of neutralizing a rigidly trained beast who attacks in order to kill. It’s rather simple: The dog leaps toward your throat, you drive your left hand with full force between the dog’s jaws and press downward, turn counterclockwise against the animal’s body while you place your right arm around its neck, grab hold of the lower jaw, and jerk it as hard as you can. Dogs have no strength in their lower jaws. They can easily be dislocated. After this, you grab hold across the nose and break the neck in the same hold by hitting the dog’s back against your right leg.
For weeks we practiced on a stuffed German shepherd who flew at us from a catapulting mechanism. The elite specialist was mighty proud of it. The sides of the poor stuffed dog were totally worn out, the lower jaw was disjointed, and the neck wobbled. The elite group stood in a line and, one by one, we stepped forward and killed the stuffed animal while the instructor howled and growled as realistically as he was able. Every time he threatened that the next one might be a real dog.
After a few weeks of practice, the instructor’s face acquired a suspicious expression and his sharp eyes began to follow me with extreme caution. He was absolutely correct. I always stepped out of the line and went behind the next man in order to avoid the brutal handiwork. The instructor shouted the way military men do, while I stressed the meaninglessness of killing a dead dog. Not even if it were alive would I want to kill it.
The instructor was foaming at the mouth. Without hesitation I had cut holes in hundreds of straw men, throttled dolls of cloth with a piece of wire in the darkness, gone swimming across straits, exploded marked tree stumps, and blared blank machine-gun shots against cardboard enemies — why then would I not break the neck of a dead dog?
“Because I feel sorry for it,” I answered.
“But you don’t feel sorry for the straw figures?” he asked shrewdly.
“No.”
That’s as far as we got.
He failed to understand how I could feel sorry for a dead dog, and I could not explain why. For my refusal to kill the stuffed dog, I was transported to the military prison in Stockholm, where I was placed in a cell for a few months. The only time I was let out was when the crown prince reached the age of majority. We military criminals were commanded to fire a salute. It remains one of my most solemn memories. On a glorious day of spring, the bunch of us pale, drawn, and inferior creatures met. One had taken one pat of butter too many, one had been intoxicated wearing a uniform while he raked leaves, and so it went. In spite of these heinous crimes, on this day we were allowed to melt into the nation’s harmonious unity.
Shortly afterward, I was cross-examined by an admiral. I explained how distasteful I found it to kill a dead dog, and he tried to convince me that military training is just a kind of preparation for a reality that nobody wishes to experience. The exercises were like games and not to be taken seriously. So I asked if it would be possible to practice on a stuffed teddy bear instead. Such a one can be bought in any large toy store. A teddy bear is less real than a stuffed dead dog, falling more into the category of the straw figures, which I willingly, even cheerfully, had cut into small pieces. I offered to return to the training camp and do that particular part of the course over again, using teddy bears.
The admiral had slithered into a discussion he could not handle. He capitulated and sent me back to camp with a box full of teddy bears.
I was given free hand when it came both to color and to size.
Our secret patrol was lined up in front of the catapult machine. To be on the safe side, I had not mentioned the teddy bears to our instructor, only that I wanted to repeat that special phase of our training. The rest of our group was forewarned. I waited, murderous and broad-legged. Out of the catapult and toward my throat flew a pink, cuddly teddy bear. I wrestled it as realistically as possible and even hit it against the ground a few extra times for good measure. Everybody except the instructor cheered the bear killer.
My happiness was not to last though.
I was discharged from the navy about the same time as the admiral asked for early retirement. There are limits to the amount of derision and ridicule an admiral can take.
Such is chance — or indescribable fate.
Because had I, like everybody else in our small attack group, chosen to dislocate the jaw violently and break the dead dog’s neck, I would probably not have ended up aboard a banana boat. An inner yellow thread runs through my life, I’m sure of it. Why else would I find myself on a banana boat?
When I was little, I always fantasized that my father worked on a banana boat. He carried out a heroic deed; he was an unsung hero. While my mother was dying and we children were scattered by the winds of ill fortune, he was bringing bananas to the Swedish people. Every time I saw someone eating a banana, I felt of noble and elevated mind. In a way I felt as if I participated in this necessary bringing home of bananas, since I had relinquished my father to the duty. I felt included in his heroic fight on behalf of the Swedish people.
There ought to have been some kind of gun salute, as I set foot aboard my first banana boat.
Instead I found myself face to face with a dear old friend, the first mate from my eventful journey in the Australian waters. That in itself is not remarkable, since the cold storage ship sailed under the same shipping firm’s flag. More remarkable was the fact that he had not yet become a captain.
Quite a few years had piled on top of one another and somewhere, in some roundabout way, he may have heard about my wondrous resurrection, but he did not seem to recognize me. The formerly so energetic little man was now gray and passive, looking ready to lose himself.
We were leaving Göteborg to get a full load of oranges in Cape Town, unload these in Europe, and then continue our roving ventures in the Pacific’s cold storage market.
A small group with placards and banners had gathered on the pier in Göteborg. They had misunderstood something and were demonstrating against importing oranges from South Africa, in spite of the fact that we had not yet picked up any. Aboard the ship the opinions about the morality of loading South African fruits were as varied as the opinions regarding the human qualities of the demonstrators. Personally I had seen more than enough of ugly racism and abominable separatism. But, being an employee aboard the ship, it would have been difficult to join the demonstration.
Standing there watching it all, the first mate suddenly reverted t
o his old self. His anger rose to a boil, he roared abusive invectives against the demonstrators, and cast off the moorings at the same time as the tugboat on the other side received the signal to pull outward. Big forces are set in motion when six thousand tons take off. We had not had time to bring home the cable spring. It slid along the pier and got stuck. A few coils were lying loosely in big rings around the bollard. The first mate was leaning against the sloping edge of the bulwark, waving provokingly, before he jumped straight down to the bollard and the cable coils. These were pulled to one side with a smacking sound and went right into the first mate’s right leg, cutting it clean off immediately below the knee joint. He fell down on the deck with a thud. Surprise and pain flashed in his eyes, and his blood pulsated forward in a hard rhythm. The steel wire creaked, snapped off with a loud noise, and flew at a rattling pace up through the air.
Everybody except me rushed over to the first mate. I tore off my pants before elbowing my way over to him. I wrapped the pant legs around the lower thigh of the bloody stump to stop the bleeding.
For an instant something glimmered in the first mate’s dull glance.
“You?” he moaned.
“Yes,” I said.
Nothing more was said between us. He was brought ashore along with the sheared-off piece of leg. Past the lighthouse of Vinga, I was still pantless. At Skagen, a new first mate was lowered aboard from a helicopter, and three weeks later we were loading oranges in Cape Town just as planned.
It is a rather common occurrence that one or another aboard a ship breaks down and goes crazy, shows pictures of his children, drops soiled love letters like leaves in the wind on deck, drinks, cries, fights, or suddenly disappears overboard one night. All that is part of the everyday life at sea. But during this trip down, the whole crew, from deck boy to commander, drank like demons in desperate fits of shivering chills. Never before have I encountered a whole crew swilling alcohol and getting sentimental shakes. To my own surprise, I began to drink as well. I played cards, cried, and got into a couple of fights, while life ahead of me seemed like an eternal, rocking and bouncing, gray-as-lead ocean.
My Father, His Son Page 8