My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  Before long I owed this deranged man a considerable debt of gratitude. If Eight had not made that strange remark about lying still when there were clicking sounds, I would not have been able to sleep even when awake. Then I would have been as dead and as meaningless as a Swedish telephone pole in Monrovia. The simile may seem strange, but the fact is that we really did unload Swedish telephone poles in Monrovia’s port while it rained cats and dogs. The telephone poles were deck cargo and stank of tar and some oily impregnation matter. Many four-letter words were pronounced applying to the idiot who had ordered wooden telephone poles to a continent that has more wood than anyone can imagine.

  Somebody pointed out the ingenious part of the undertaking. It must be as difficult to sell wooden poles to West Africa as to sell snowplows in the Sahara. We shrugged it off, happy to know that they would finally disappear from deck. They were long and slippery, which made them a nuisance, dangerous to unload with our own booms. But the stevedores in Monrovia were far from stupid. They rigged holds in pulleys and drove like mad with five, six poles in every sling.

  The rain was of the heavy, steady kind. We kept slipping as we crawled around on the greasy poles. It was a tiring undertaking. At the end of the day, I tore off my clothes, threw myself down on my berth, and fell asleep immediately. A few ports in West Africa had already taught me that it’s hardly worth the trouble to go ashore. Getting whacked on the head and robbed gives you headaches. Safer to go to sleep and save the money for healthier amusements in other ports.

  Sometime during the night I was awakened by a clicking sound. It clicked clearly and distinctly. I was wide awake but tried to imagine myself still dreaming since I was scared. What was that sound in the darkness? A black hypnotist who would snip off my fingers in a moment? Perhaps I was already hypnotized to feel nothing, to be unable to move, only to lie there as a tranquilized but fully awake piece of luggage?

  I had been at sea almost three years. Bit by bit, that time had filed off some of my uncontrolled curiosity. Being now a little over eighteen years old, I did not take everything indiscriminately to heart anymore. But since I had just heard about the mysterious clicking, I couldn’t help it if my imagination ran wild.

  I lay there for a long, long time, quite paralyzed. Possibly I trembled the way mice do when they sit, stiff and frightened, in front of a snake’s hissing gap. With my nose toward the bulkhead, I ordered my unencumbered left ear to sail off on a scouting trip in the dark. Nobody there. Nobody there. And nobody there …

  And yet, perhaps somebody was right there in my cabin?

  His breathing sounded exactly like mine, and he was stinking as much from the slippery telephone poles as I was. He was so close that I got a whiff of dried cod. We had tons of fish aboard, having loaded them in Bergen, Norway. It rained there, too.

  I shut my eyes tightly and tried to think back to Bergen. I had good memories of Bergen. She also smelled of cod. But perhaps that was only because we had been smooching under a tarpaulin that covered tons of it. Just like me, that load was waiting to get aboard and out of the rain. But this girl did not want to be counted among those who accept invitations to go aboard ships. We had to stand under the tarp and kiss as well as we were able while the stench of cod brought waves of nausea into my throat.

  Perhaps it was just the memory of that situation that had awakened in my nostrils?

  I turned over on my other side, facing the darkness of the cabin, and laughed softly, a small neighing laughter, at my own wild fantasies. Naturally I would be the one to imagine that I had a bunch of clicking blacks in my cabin. The neigh froze against my lips when I opened my eyes to affirm that I was alone. The whites of two enormous eyes gleamed just inches from my face. The owner of the eyes was squatting next to the berth, waiting for me to sit up and look around the cabin.

  It was a rather shrewd thing to do. But my staying immobile for so long had made him curious to find out if I was asleep or not. He had just snuck his head close to mine when I turned over and opened my eyes. Being that close, it would be easy for him to stab me with his knife, should I happen to discover him. The blade of the knife glinted in the dark. What could I say? Excuse me, sir, but you must have taken the wrong turn!

  There was no time for me to figure out a suitable polite phrase. I felt the air movement caused by his arm when the knife came at me.

  Quickly I rolled off the berth, right on top of the man. The many breathless seconds I had spent waiting and listening in the dark had pumped me brimful of adrenaline. The strange clicking sound had prepared me.

  He was wearing only a pair of shorts and a hard hat. Perhaps he had heard about Eight’s iron lids that fell on people? We rolled around, fighting, for a while. Having crawled across the sticky telephone poles he was greasy and slippery as an eel. Slithering around with him in the cabin made the fight seem like a bad joke. It was like both trying to protect myself and hanging on to an enormously strong and alive gigantic soap. Plop! He slipped away. The knife clattered on the cabin floor. I understood that he was groping around for it, so I scrambled to my feet and jumped as high as I could in order to land on his back.

  It worked! The air went out of him. He stayed inert a few seconds. Strangely enough, the hard hat was still on his head. Its sharp edge had torn the skin on my forehead. Blood pumped out over my eyes. I had trouble seeing, as I tumbled down on his slippery back and took a steady hold of the helmet with both hands. Then I pulled it back with all my might. As I had figured, the leather strap cut in under the chin and toward the throat. He let out a death rattle. I pulled and yanked. The seconds ticked away like hard New Year’s counts against my heart. I aged and was born a hundred times before the body grew limp and collapsed underneath me.

  Had I strangled the nightly intruder?

  There was no time to make sure. I slammed the door hard behind me and locked it, turning the key twice. There! Now I had imprisoned my burglar. Perhaps even killed him, I thought the next moment. What should I do? It did not feel like a barrel of fun to go to Eight, shake him awake, and tell him that I had just throttled a black one. We would probably get stuck in a complicated debate as to whether or not I had really done it.

  The problem was shoved aside, at least temporarily, when I happened to glance down at the floor under my feet. Either my lone scoundrel had danced a preparatory hypnotic dance on his bare, oily feet in the aisle or else there were more of his kind aboard.

  The cabin beside mine was occupied by a man from the island of Gotland; he was called the Islander. An old but hardy fellow who seemed to have sailed the seas since the days of the Flying Dutchman. I yanked the Islander’s door open and caught sight of yet another hopeful lad crawling on the cabin floor. Quick as a wink, I pulled out the key, slammed the door, and turned the key twice from the outside.

  Now I had two thieves and one Islander locked in. All hell broke loose in there. It sounded as if the Islander were practicing discus throwing with the thief.

  Then my eyes discovered more footprints. They led all the way to Stockholm’s cabin. Stockholm’s real name was Karlsson, but since we only had one man from the fair city of Stockholm aboard, he was the target for everybody’s distrust and envy of the Swedish capital and its inhabitants. I repeated the locking maneuver with his cabin door.

  The place teemed with black, oil-impregnated, and stinking robbers and burglars. All of a sudden I had caught three!

  Stockholm let out loud cries and protests. He wanted me to remove the thief from his cabin.

  “Why should I?” I yelled back. “He’d just run away!”

  “I’ve got no clothes on!” Stockholm roared in answer.

  I had trouble understanding what that had to do with anything. Especially since I myself was completely nude. I looked as if somebody had rolled me in tar and clotted blood. I could barely see, due to all the blood flowing from the wound in my forehead, but in spite of this I ran around locking in thieves as if my life depended on it. We argued back and forth about who sh
ould fight Stockholm’s thief while the rest of the crew came running.

  Most of those further aft were from Göteborg, historically a rival of Stockholm, and those witty lads demanded immediately that the poor thief should be let out of Stockholm’s cabin for purely humanitarian reasons. As a punishment, it was too tough, just one step from being sent to the gas chamber, to be forced to spend time in the same cabin as a nude and hysterical man from Stockholm. After some palavers and considerable gaiety, all serving to put me as the hero in the center, the watchman, the first mate, and even Eight himself came down.

  Eight was holding the watchman by the ear, saying that this was the same old conspiracy. He promised to hang the whole bunch of us from the yardarm. That was funny since we did not have any yardarm.

  I thanked him sincerely for the warnings to remain still whenever there was a clicking sound. He looked somewhat wonderingly at me, as if I rather than he were the crazy one.

  “I was talking about the compass! You should keep still and not weave back and forth so much!” he hollered and snapped his fingers in front of my face. It looked rather amusing since he had no fingers to snap with. Still I swear that I did see him snap his fingers.

  The explanation may be that I thought it was painful for him not being able to snap his fingers. At times I wonder where my soul has its center and habitat. Mostly it seems to fly around like an agitated and compassionate ghost inside other people’s troubles. It was the same thing when my mother coughed so horribly that she died. I could actually see my own small lungs constrict in cramp and sympathy. And now it happened with Eight. I giggled a little nervously and wanted so very much for him to be able to snap his fingers. When he kept scowling, I consoled him with the fact that, be that as it may, he had still saved my life.

  He proceeded to become the jolly Green Giant. In order to avoid having to embrace me like a long-lost son, he pulled my ear. It hurt like hell. Horrendous strength lived in the remaining small stump of the index finger. He lifted me several inches off the cabin floor and urged three cheers for a real live throttler of blacks.

  Then the Islander came out. That is to say, he yanked the door open with such force that splinters flew. He had finished the battle with his thief but was still belligerent and confused. He growled and fumbled for new human beings to use and throw as a discus. Unfortunately he chose me. I guess he didn’t understand why the men were cheering someone whose ear was being pulled. Besides, I was nearly black from all the tar. He took hold of me and threw me into the bulkhead. Lucky for me Eight let go of my ear, otherwise I would have had to live out my life with one ear dragging on the ground. I was made of elastic material and it would probably have stretched like chewing gum rather than broken off. But my elasticity only went so far. I had had it. I stayed right there on the floor and fainted.

  When I came to, the bulky Islander sat like a worried and tall monolith beside my berth. Bloody and torn, he still managed a small, almost joyous smile when he noticed that I was awake. On my stomach was placed the thief’s hard hat, standing upside down like a chamber pot. The Islander winked with a bluish, swollen eye and fished around in the hat. As I was wondering what I might look like, he hissed with his cracked voice, “You don’t drink strong stuff. But Eight sent down some goodies anyhow.”

  He unwrapped the shimmering green tinfoil on the first miniature liquor-filled chocolate bottle.

  “Brandy. After that we’ll try a little Swedish punch. And then a small cordial. Which we rinse down with another cognac.”

  After thirty-eight bottles, I felt both intoxicated and hyperactive. So I fell asleep. And that was the first time I fell asleep while awake. An extremely cold and alert person existed inside the seemingly sound-asleep one. Like a coiled steel spring, I reacted to the tiniest sound. I tried to strangle the Islander twice that night, the minute he made the slightest movement. He fed me several more chocolate bottles and sang a lullaby about big mountains and little trolls who couldn’t find their way home. Very beautiful. I think I cried a little against his broad shoulder. He was better than my father had ever been.

  When I awoke in the morning, he grinned broadly.

  “Morning, Strangler.”

  An unpleasant truth to wake up to, but I took comfort in the fact that things could have been worse. Imagine waking up in Monrovia being both dead and robbed!

  With nearly forty centiliters ?—or thirteen and a half fluid ounces — of sweetly sticky hangover in my body after the Islander’s insistent and considerate refills, I crawled with painful difficulty up on deck for breakfast and saw the world anew, having throttled my first black one. I noted exactly how it looked.

  Suddenly I remembered a boatswain, Bengtsson by name, who for a long time had been like a father to me. He was far from religious but almost sounded as if he were when he summed up his life-acquired wisdom. “If a human being is truly good, he will be crucified.” It was eloquently expressed. I thought of Bengtsson and wanted to cry. But I braced myself and did not let one single tear through. I managed rather well, according to the Islander. A few more years and I’d have the makings of a real sailor, able to drink through the night and still work a full day. As I said, he was rather old-fashioned. God knows what he poured inside himself, but he always smelled of old, sour jungle juice.

  It took me a full week to figure out if I had killed a human being or not. The crew stubbornly insisted on calling me the Strangler. It did not help that I finally was told that the thief had recovered and been put ashore. It remained eerie.

  I have had reasons to consider these kinds of dilemmas before. Since the day I was old enough to understand spoken language, my mother kept telling me that we children would be the death of her. It wasn’t much fun when we finally succeeded.

  Generally speaking, it isn’t much fun to keep brooding over the question of whether one has brought death to someone or not. Equally terrible is to plan another’s demise. And even worse when people die right in front of you with no one caring.

  When I was little, I didn’t think that growing up would be like this. I believed that my soul would open up like a flower since I would be strong enough to defend it. Of course it was childish arrogance to see one’s soul as some kind of white lily that would burst into bloom later.

  I had probably acquired my arrogance from Grandma’s outhouse. Since she knew that I used to sit there and read, she prepared the outhouse with religious parables in cheap editions. At least half of them told of small children who on the very last page were transformed into saintlike creatures. It was very beautiful and convincing, and I simply awaited my turn.

  Unfortunate circumstances made me instead snuff out my mother’s life.

  At the age of eighteen, I had long ago forgotten my childhood and all silly notions of my lily white soul ready to burst into bloom. It’s rather amusing. During the teens, you need to remember your childhood’s holy oaths to rehabilitate and reconstitute the natural and healthy parts of childhood, but then the hormones take over and produce a thick mess of sperms as an efficient cover, placed right over the possibly innocent images you have of yourself. You simply don’t want to remember yourself as a child. As a teenager, you betray your childhood without thinking, and even if it burns in urgent flames, you don’t see it. I believe this story may be about how I as a teenager managed never to betray my past, even if the rocky, often violent drive of destiny did its utmost to mold me into an image as like my father as possible.

  My perception of him when I was a child was that of a metal bullet. My own hardening process was not far behind his. So what would it sound like when we met? Clank! Clank!

  The fact that I as a memorial to my fierce struggle and honorable victory in Monrovia had been tabbed the Strangler and then been able to associate on friendly terms with the strong-as-an-ox Islander without toppling over backwards when he engulfed me in his fetid breath were parts of my final exams before the inevitable encounter with my father. The only missing piece would have been my own imbibi
ng the Islander’s jungle juice.

  That is how far back my thoughts transported me while I stood on the bridge, waiting for an all-clear signal from Eight, when his face suddenly split in a broad grin and he said, “Jungle juice.”

  “Oh yeah,” I answered as flatly as I could.

  That was a lesson I had learned: Conversations with madmen should be conducted with inflections and voice totally devoid of passion. Eight may have loved jungle juice or perhaps he hated the home-brewed concoction or he might want me to reveal my own relationship to the cheap brew.

  “Stockholm. Of course he has been drinking that goddamned half-fermented mash. Was it the Islander who served it?”

  I remained silent, thereby taking the risk that Eight would twist my ear. But who can betray someone who has sung lullabies about mountains and trolls by one’s berth?

  “Were it up to me, I’d rather portion out bottles of honest-to-goodness Swedish schnapps,” Eight said with a sigh. “But then the folks back at the shipping line would think I had gone crazy. And we don’t want them to know about that, do we?”

  On that point I could only nod reassuringly. I had no reason to write home to the shipping company about it.

  We stood there for a while and talked back and forth in that uncertain way you do with madmen. All the time, I nourished an eerie feeling that our conversation was about something totally different than the missing Stockholm.

  Finally Eight let out a deep sigh and said that there wasn’t a thing one could do about it.

  “You ought to go to sleep. Or why not go over and see your father? A good man. He has decided to be especially kind toward all children since he can’t be sure which ones are his own. We’ve sailed together. Do that. Go and see him. I’m sure he’d be happy. Here are some cigarettes — to pay for the round-trip. But don’t give them the pack before you’re there. People have died for less here on the river. A few years ago an Englishmen lost three men on his crew. They were going to follow in separate canoes to go swimming.”