My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  Nothing happens.

  I sling him over my shoulder, his head hanging down, and run toward the road. Perhaps the shaking will make the heart start working again. My father-in-law has not yet arrived with the car. I swear and I cry, running along the pebble-strewn road, past people who stop and look questioningly. My voice sounds like a saw working against marble, a thin and cutting sound, as I keep hollering.

  “He’s not dead! He’s not dead!”

  The car has been brought out of the garage and is parked in front of the house.

  My mother-in-law and Louise stand outside it, pulling at the door handles. My father-in-law sits in the front seat. He has locked himself inside the car. I understand. He probably jumped into the car, drove out of the garage, and all of a sudden realized that he was not sober. Now he thinks he can hide that fact by refusing to open the doors.

  I throw Jonas down on the ground and yell to Louise to keep giving him artificial respiration. I grab the spade and break the side window. It takes me one second to pull my father-in-law out of the car. Sobbing loudly, he crawls on the ground, while Louise jumps into the backseat and I place Jonas in her lap.

  We drive.

  Glancing at the back mirror, I notice that she wants to stop giving Jonas artificial respiration and indulge in her own sobbing instead. My voice is a roar.

  “Don’t give up!?

  ALGERIA

  1976

  The one thing I have wished hard for in this life is to be a father who is there for my son. I cannot understand how Louise could even think of divorce and of taking Jonas away from me. We ought to talk intensely about such things, Louise and I. But instead I am sitting in the hallway, staring into Monsieur Verdurin’s kerosene heater. The flame is waving on half-mast inside the soiled glass. The North African night is devilishly cold in the beginning of the year. I ought to put more kerosene into the heater, but first I must ask Louise who the hell Erik is. If she doesn’t answer, I’ll go and hide in the Landrover and then appear suddenly. Unexpected meetings and quick farewells are my specialty. I got that from my father.

  NIGERIA

  1963

  The chain cable thundered out of the capstan. Its roaring noise was quickly absorbed by the stifling, threatening jungle foliage on both sides along the river. The anchor hung suspended in the sluggish water of the yellow, muddy Niger and then swung up in the direction of the current when the plows began catching on to the sludge. The din and the smoke from the capstan burned like a stinging iron ring in the nose. I tightened the brake lever. We were there. All the chain cable that ought to be out was out. Through the loudspeaker, our captain tried to cut holes in the quiet morning, but nothing could tear apart the deep silence. The third mate answered, while I jumped up on the heel of one of the bollards and gazed out over the river.

  At some distance, perhaps not more than a hundred yards away, there rested our sister ship, sprung from the same shipping firm as ours.

  My father stood in the midship aisle.

  The anchor was still sinking slowly through the black mire. The chain cable bent and straightened. Slowly, we were moving closer.

  I was a little over eighteen years old and had sailed on West Africa for the last six months. This was my third trip. I had not seen my father since I was fourteen. We were always sailing past each other. When he was at home, I was away. And vice versa. In time I had fostered a feeling that he no longer existed. I knew that he sailed as engine operator on the sister ship, but we were always weeks apart in our minutely planned trading routes along the West African coast and the ports in Europe, including Scandinavia. Something must have happened; otherwise we wouldn’t be riding anchor side by side in Nigeria’s humid, stinking jungle.

  My father lifted his arm in greeting.

  The anchor was getting a more tenacious hold. The thick cable creaked. Its thickness matched my father’s lower arm.

  The distance between us shrank to a little over fifty yards. He didn’t look as large as I remembered him. The air was absolutely still. The temperature had already risen to above thirty degrees centigrade and total silence reigned. If you believe that West Africa’s jungles and marshes are filled with shrieking life, think again. It is silent and hot. Everything rots and gets moldy, grows and dies in a violent cycle.

  I looked at the figure who was my father and thought of the last four years. He had grown smaller but was dressed, as always, in one of his pale blue and well-worn overalls. A faint smell of oil and gasoline assaulted my nostrils. But that was pure imagination. That acrid, slightly raw, and pungent odor mingled with that of detergent and perhaps sun and wind was nothing but a memory. When I was little, I sometimes clung to that smell. It came from another world, a world into which both my father and my maternal grandfather disappeared. Mostly it was my father’s world since Grandpa’s overalls smelled more of oil and dirt. It was a thicker, heavier smell that he arrived and left with in an unbroken rhythm: morning, breakfast, dinner, and night. My father’s overalls, on the other hand, were always clean and packed in a suitcase. If I secretly brought out one of these overalls and pulled it over me, it wasn’t just the size that swallowed me. Those odors of sun and wind, perhaps of foreign detergents, came from Africa, from America, or perhaps from the Pacific Ocean. That hole in the pant leg was mended in Conakry, that white spot from corroding droppings stemmed from an albatross who sailed across the ship on his way to Australia.

  The suitcase was unpacked and packed. He came and he disappeared.

  Now he stood there, short and thickset with his sturdy rib cage bursting out of the overalls. He looked like his own father. But my paternal grandpa was not an overalls type of person. That grandpa smelled of elegant importance. For a long time I believed that he was better than the rest of us. Coffee, spices, and cigars from foreign countries combined into an excellent odor for a short, broad man with graying hair and a well-groomed mustache. He was a driver at an import firm. First horse and cart, then truck, and finally the executive car — he drove it all faultlessly. That was his contribution, along with the fact that he supported eight children and took care of a home with a constantly complaining, sickly wife. He did everything with a sort of sullen kindliness. The few times he opened his mouth to speak, he was surprisingly funny.

  Was Grandpa’s fate the reason for my father’s unwillingness to stay at home with us kids when Mom took ill?

  The ship shuddered. It felt like a sudden push beneath the soles of one’s feet. The main engine was turned off. We had come to a stop and rode with a slight roll at anchor. Actually we were too close to the other ship, but everything was immobile in the suffocating heat. What could happen? We waited. And I observed my father disappearing into the midship aisle’s black hole. I suppose he had things to do.

  I could have called out to him, could have asked him across the river Niger’s yellow, slow-moving water, “Why didn’t you stay home with us?”

  Instead I turned to the third mate, who had come to stand beside me.

  “That was my father.”

  I pointed toward the black hole. He was gone.

  “Is that so?” said the third mate.

  To him there was nothing strange about my experience. To a sailor, nothing is strange. In fact, everything is so peculiar that the one who takes every event to heart will soon go crazy. Those who survive have become hardened and keep forging layer after layer of indifference around themselves.

  The third mate was pale under his tan, red-eyed and shaky. I probably looked even worse. We had a few days and nights in hell behind us. Only Eight-Finger Karlsson — for the sake of simplicity simply called Eight ?—the river pilot, the third mate, and I were awake. The rest of the crew slept or had perhaps just opened aching eyes after forty-eight hours of search and lookout, all in vain, ever since Stockholm, so-called because he was from that city, had disappeared.

  Our captain, who was well aware that we called him Eight, rasped in the loudspeaker again. I was given the command to show up on
the bridge. That was expected since I was the only one who had been present when Stockholm jumped.

  Eight sat on the bridge in the high, bolted-down wooden chair meant only for captains and pilots. As I understood it, he had only moved from it once in the last forty-eight hours, which in itself was a feat. He rubbed his eyes with the paddle-like hands where all the fingers had been cut off in line with the thumbs and consequently were only about three quarters of an inch long. Usually jovial and happy, reminding me of the stereotyped Mexican movie bandito just before he puts the knife into the back of an unsuspecting victim, Eight did not have much grin left now in his fatherly face.

  He had sailed on West Africa for more than twenty years. Disregarding the fact that he was mad as a coot and had stumps for fingers, he had done rather well for himself. He was of athletic build, and there were rumors that he could move an eight-thousand-ton ship with his bare hands. I know that trick, too. The key is to be sober when you do it. But that’s another story.

  In spite of his age, Eight’s inky black hair curled without any gray wisps. The nose was a big, meaty bulb that arose between sea green eyes. Those always twinkled merrily when he asked if one had “throttled any black ones” during the course of the day. Everybody knows that sailors have their own poetic expressions for bodily functions. He became exorbitantly happy if one’s answer was affirmative, clucking and asking, “Is that a fact?” After several months aboard, I finally realized that Eight had knocked up against and entered a world where real black beings were actually strangled.

  Having an insane skipper aboard is not an immense problem. It’s worse to have a mad first mate, a screwy bosun, or — banish the thought! — a demented cook. As long as Eight received his daily reports as to how many black ones the crew had strangled during the last twenty-four hours, he remained relatively calm. And the sailors’ descriptions of a visit to the toilet became loaded down with more jokes. Common euphemisms were “bend a cable” or “write a poem.” Especially the latter had a mirthful meaning within our ship’s bulwarks.

  Long ago a motorman aboard this ship was constantly complaining about his troublesome stomach and consequently he spent hours of his workday in the John. Purple-faced from anger and high blood pressure, the head engineer timed the motorman and came to the conclusion that he was actually worth only a third of his wages. But, since things are not handled that way, the motorman got his full pay. Of course, he signed off before too long.

  About a year later, the motorman published a collection of poems, Black Drums, and told in an interview how he had written the poems in the engine room’s toilet. The article reached the ship, forwarded by someone, perhaps the motorman himself. The head engineer was still there. But only so long as it took to read the word portrait of “the poet with engine songs in his blood.” Then the head engineer had a heart attack and died on his feet. I have to believe this to be a true story, since I have used the toilet in the engine room and read a poem scratched into the bulkhead. But that, too, is another story.

  Eight was sitting on the bridge, and he wanted something from me. Here in Sapele, the nerves to the absent fingers were bothering him and his luxuriant heartiness was replaced by inward brooding. I stood there, my eyes glued to his face, waiting a few eternities. Perhaps I slept standing up since I was rather drained after the two heartrending days. Perhaps I was even dreaming.

  Anyhow, eternities kept flowing right through me and I felt as if I truly understood him. Tricky nerves is something that happens to everyone. I myself never slept anymore except when I was awake. Soon enough I will explain why, since Eight plays a definite part in such a preposterous statement. But first I have to tell how his fingers were sheared off.

  As a relatively young second mate, Eight took the ongoing thievery in the cargo hold to heart. In every port the world over, part of the cargo disappears in strange ways. In Palermo, New York, Tangier … a long list of black holes where just about anything can go up in smoke in spite of watchmen and heavy locks. And every single port along the Gold Coast qualifies for a top place on that list.

  Eight realized that locks and guards were rather unsophisticated thief-catching methods. The thing to do was to break tradition and resort to methods employed by those governing Africa’s corrupt political meshwork. Tools such as the Leopard Men in Sierra Leone use. Sudden and unexplainable diseases or death. A leopard’s paw scratched as an ominous sign on the ground outside the afflicted one’s house. Scratch marks appearing on the chest of a corpse. That’s how the Leopard Men govern. That’s how they have ruled for a long time. So perhaps it wasn’t overly remarkable that Eight figured out his own leopard pattern. Simple, yes, but so shrewd and so violent that the word spread like wildfire from port to port.

  Eight let one of the heavy iron lids of the cargo hold stay wide open during the night. A hasp on its back prevented the lid from accidentally closing. From that hasp he stretched a thin fishing line of nylon up to the bridge wing, and from the edge of the lid he stretched yet another nylon line. It was a stretch of a little more than fifty yards, but, with two sturdy rods used for deep-sea fishing, he had the strength and flexibility to jerk it taut. The lid became a highly perilous variation of a simple bird trap.

  Eight sat on the bridge wing with his night field glass — and waited. He did not have to wait long before he saw his first victim sneak across the deck and crawl down. At the exact moment that the thief lowered his head, Eight yanked on the nylon line. The hasp flew up and the lid flew down and cut off the thief’s fingers.

  Afterward everything was quiet as the grave since the victim had also been hit in the head by the heavy lid, knocking him headlong four, five yards down to the ladder pit. All Eight had to do was to climb down and remove the nylon lines. The cutoff fingers and the victim were left until the next morning when the stevedores came aboard and discovered the poor devil. The message spread rapidly.

  After a number of similar accidents, the ship acquired a reputation of fighting back by its own magical power. With the exception of the mutilated and sometimes seriously injured small-time thieves, everything was fine. The one who advanced in his career faster than anybody was Eight. Both bolted down and loose property aboard his ship remained untouched.

  Once he was made captain, Eight was no longer content to savor his secret in silence. At one time he had picked up a ring finger and dried it in the sun. The turner was ordered to make an artfully ornate brass ring at the finger’s cutoff surface and drill a hole through it. Eight put the resulting ornament on a leather string. Right outside the deck office was a cupboard with a glass window for the key to the fire equipment, in case of a fire aboard. Eight substituted the finger for the key and changed the written message to read: “In case of thievery.”

  He overdid it.

  He took away the unexplainable, the eerie magic that everybody along the coast had swallowed tooth and nail. His joke was too gross. The men feared that revenge would hit blindly. It did in Sapele, and it hit with grim exactness.

  Nobody knows precisely how Eight lost his own fingers. He awoke one morning as usual, seemingly healthy and whole. Then he felt something sticky on his hands and lifted one hand to pull off the sheet. First he saw all the blood. When he saw his hands, the story goes that his screams were so loud that the whole crew could hear them. A long line formed all the way to his cabin. A screaming captain with eight cutoff fingers was something everyone wanted to see. Some claimed, of course, that they just wanted to see what a captain’s cabin looked like. That may be an equally likely story. Many of them would never have a chance for an exclusive viewing again. A little blood and some injuries are things most sailors get to see too often, but a glimpse of a captain’s cabin would be almost like getting an idea of how Our Lord lives.

  There were some strange things about Eight’s cutoff fingers. The turner complained later that he had lost a bolt cutter, so the tool was obvious. But how had the revenger been able to cut off Eight’s fingers without Eight feeling it? And
why did Eight keep screaming that he had heard a clicking sound?

  Explanations and interpretations of this event have outstripped the wind across the seas as they have raced from ship to ship. Some were of the opinion that Eight in his sleep had heard when the bolt cutter snapped off the fingers. Others thought that Eight had been anesthetized quickly and effectively. What spoke against that version was that it was not pain that had made Eight scream like that. Others said that the clicking sounds were some kind of hypnotic signals.

  Whatever the case, Eight became a legend.

  Much earlier, a November night in Cartagena, Spain, I had heard of the thief catcher’s fate but had dismissed the story as drunken ravings. I had forgotten it by the time I signed on for the West Africa trade route. It wasn’t until three weeks later, right outside of Monrovia, that I laid eyes on our captain. There was nothing unusual about that. Like all other gods, captains rule most efficiently by remaining invisible. I was standing at the helm and had almost written the figure eight in the backwash when he put himself right in front of me, scratched his eyes with a crippled hand, and asked if I had ever throttled a black one. Since he was grinning, I took it as some kind of a joke and answered affirmatively. He liked that but expressed the opinion that I steered like a garden rake. Then he stared at me with his jovial and dangerous smile and admonished me to lie absolutely still if I heard clicking sounds.

  I nodded and agreed with everything.

  So we had a mad skipper aboard. Best to treat him normally — with respect and keeping as much distance as possible.