My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  Eight laughed uproariously.

  “The devil made sure they got to swim!”

  It was weird to hear one of my father’s standing jokes from the lips of Eight. The one about the children. Eight had no way of knowing that I used to have a totally different understanding of that joke. The punch line was that my father in actuality was kind to all children always, except his own. With growing amazement we had observed his predilection for giving presents to other children. A flashlight, a pocketknife, or a considerable money gift for some cousin’s child’s birthday seemed to appear frequently in front of our stupefied eyes. He wanted to stay more popular with the children of our relatives than with his own. Why that was so, we never managed to comprehend.

  “What about Stockholm?” I asked.

  Eight didn’t answer. He slept, his head rolled down toward his shoulder. I stood there awhile and studied him. Even when he slept, there was a cunning expression on his face. Or perhaps the whole affair with Stockholm had warped my judgment.

  We were on our way into the mouth of the Niger. The river opens up in an enormous delta toward the sea. An endless lowland with marshes and swampy ground, dead and yet alive: During unfathomable stretches of time something totally worthless has kept producing a rich secret — oil. High fire flames from the new drill towers licked the sky. That made Eight swear as he walked back and forth on the bridge in the darkness. The drill towers made navigation a shaky business. It was hard to make out the faintly blinking fairway buoy that is the meeting spot for ships and pilots.

  The first time I saw the pilots, I had trouble masking my laughter. They came in four, five open outrigger dories with outboard engines, and each one contained a raggedy, colorful bunch, costumed in a multitude of stolen shipping flags.

  The steersmen hollered and tried to ram each other while the pilots themselves authoritatively waved soiled letters of recommendation and loudly began to negotiate their price with Eight. To no one’s surprise, he chose the cheapest one, a small, crooked man a bit over sixty with running, purulent eyes and lacking a right leg. The explanation voiced aboard ship was that Eight and the pilot were brothers in their respective handicaps. We couldn’t care less.

  The pilot brought his own steersmen along, two strong young men, who effortlessly climbed up a thick piece of manila rope like monkeys, one of them carrying the pilot on his back.

  “Look carefully, Strangler,” said the Islander. He happened to stand beside me on deck when the steersmen with the pilot scrambled aboard.

  The Islander emitted his usual stench of jungle juice. He panted loudly over my hair, and I wondered if he could function as flamethrower if ignited. I felt my hair go limp from the noxious breath and moved a few feet away while I asked what exactly he meant.

  “That’s how they do it. Ten men with big hooks fastened to ropes. In an outrigger like that. They catch up with us during the night, climb aboard, cut the crew into dead pieces, and load all the stolen stuff aboard their dory. They’re gone before anyone notices a thing. Besides, how can we notice if we’re dead as doornails?”

  He laughed out loud and met one of the steersmen’s outstretched hands with his enormous clenched fists. Instead of taking the proffered hand, the Islander continued the movement and took a good hold of the man’s throat. He yanked him up the last foot over the railing, clucked noisily, and let the young man’s robust body fall like an empty overcoat on the deck.

  “But then we’ll strangle them, won’t we?”

  I nodded, agreed, and laughed as raw and heartily as I could at the Islander’s joke while the young steersman crawled up to the bridge quicker than a whip’s lash. What else could I do but laugh? Ever since the night in Monrovia, I was considered the specialist when it came to strangling natives.

  That was the first and only time I laughed at these masterful professionals. The one-legged pilot and his two steersmen handled our big freighter as if she were a canoe racing forward through the river’s sharp bends. In places the Niger was hardly wider than our ship — we would almost have needed hinges on her to manage the narrowest parts.

  The worst was to stand anchor watch, prepared to let both anchors go simultaneously should the pilot or his steersman miscalculate the river’s capricious new furrows and sandbanks.

  Standing at the tip of the bow was like being placed one yard from a movie screen with a mad projectionist in the back rolling a Tarzan film at abnormally high speed. I never saw Tarzan, just a lot of green stuff flimmering past the tip of my nose, and I was hanging on to the capstan’s two braking cranks as if it were a question of life and death every second. Bit by bit I got used to it and relaxed a little. I discovered that it was better to look astern. That way I received a reverse picture, an impression of standing on the only nonmoving spot. The poop deck looked as if it were wrapped in tenacious lianas and suspended branch work. Miraculously enough, only now and then did a branch get stuck. I was standing there, imagining the crew awakened by a terrifying thunder, rushing up, and staring, only to say hello to their brothers, a mass of paralyzed and frightened monkeys.

  As usual, I found myself in a precarious position whenever I started to laugh at others. Through the loudspeaker Eight hollered his command to let down both anchors. I whirled around and stared in panic at the bow, already ploughing the dense greenery.

  “Behind which tree should I drop anchor?” I called out to Eight.

  “Select one you’d like to hang from,” he yelled back.

  He could only appreciate his own jokes.

  I dropped both anchors, jumping around in a hell of smoke and sparks while I turned the brake cranks and attempted to stop the thundering anchor cables without yanking the capstan apart.

  The sun hurried to hide behind a drenching shower of leaves and branches. The pregnant silence that followed seemed almost like a rumbling hell. When I disentangled myself from the slippery, sticky greenery, it sounded as if a large animal had tumbled down from a branch. I stood stock-still. A more desolate sound I have never heard. As if thousands of crocodiles were burping all at the same time. We were stuck in the sludge. The jungle had already begun to swallow us. We were being screwed down in the swampy sand, inch by inch. The burning deck under the soles of my feet was sinking downward.

  The ship did not have enough buoyancy to withstand what we had brought about. We were stuck in a gigantic wedge of suctorial ooze. The smacking sound returned, the ship was pulled down, down, down …

  I began to contemplate from which tree I would be hanged. The whole thing was my fault. Everything. I had gotten involved in thinking of a stupid joke for exactly the number of seconds needed to stop the ship in time.

  Eight’s voice on the loudspeaker calmed me. The only thing he demanded was for me to find the capstan underneath the rubbish of branches and lianas.

  “Remember to look out for snakes. Those little black devils kill you in ten seconds,” his clucking voice rang out over the quiet jungle.

  He found that funny.

  My eyes searched feverishly for the little black killers. Any branch could be a camouflaged snake. When I started to clear out the stuff, the Islander arrived, large and sure, with a fire hose on his shoulder. He waved me away, connected the hose, and put the mouthpiece on high pressure. Sure enough, here and there a small black snake wiggled down into the anchor hold while leaves, twigs, and branches flew in every direction.

  I shivered in the damp heat, as if the snakes had wormed their way under my shirt. The Islander then drove the capstan while I leaned out over the railing and rinsed off snakes, leaves, and branches. Half inch by half inch, we made our way out. It took hours before we were liberated from the jungle’s deadly embrace. Slowly, the black, stinking mud came up along the cable and, as slowly, we glided out into the river.

  Once back in our right element, we could see how the bow had made a cut, sharp as the edge of an ax, into the jungle’s black sludge. Trees and bushes had been mowed down. Anyone passing would have found the enormous
slash into the jungle’s green hide totally mysterious and without rhyme or reason. But I knew that by the next journey, three months later, the wound would be healed.

  Perhaps life did the same with me. Most days and nights disappeared in endless monotony, but then there happened one second of crucial importance; it expanded and developed into minutes, hours, and days, which put a gigantic wedge into me. But the events came and went and along with them disappeared all visible traces. I would never be able to point to these deep, huge dents in my life and make them understandable.

  One West African port after the other went past, in flickering speed. Every port, every day, and every night had, of course, its special quality.

  We glide through a bluish white and incandescent flowery meadow under the Southern Cross. I cling to the rope ladder on my way up to the bridge wing. Once up there, I am in another time and upon another ocean — I sing a mad and loud song over Biscaya’s wheezy wave tops. A flash of summer lightning strikes the foremast. A pale, surprised face is visible during a tenth of a second, then everything drowns in blackness again. It’s warm. Europe disappears out of memory as a piece of melting ice under the sun’s welding flames. Offshore the air is almost dry. I lean forward, toward the surface of the bridge that is exposed to the wind, stand still, and feel the hairs on my arms rise to greet the cool wind that floats past.

  The views change, coasts sink into the ocean, mountains break up the eternal horizon, every day is different.

  But one thing remains eternally the same. I have no choice. The ship is both my home and my prison. For a few short hours I may be allowed some carousing ashore. But my time is carefully premeasured.

  One night, as we pass an illuminated city, I want to step off, simply walk straight overboard. Perhaps that is the night when I think of my father, the years he has traveled, and the time both of us now sail through in the same manner. I begin to understand him more and more. The inconceivable indifference he has always displayed toward those closest to him is at least partly shaped by his years as a sailor. He is a surface that has been hardened by thousands and again thousands of days of disappointment.

  I understand that I am learning to relate to reality as the jungle relates to us when we injure it. It heals its own wounds. Nothing is visible. My compassion for myself and others turns inward. I can’t do anything about it. It lies deep inside and pants, like a beaten puppy, while we pass continents, ports, illuminated cities in an eternal continuity. Everything is the same thing. There is nothing out there to long for or to awaken emotions. I break the habit of thinking of home since I am my own isolated home. A shell grows all around me with frightening speed, and I understand that my desire to go to sea may have to do with crawling beneath my father’s hard surface. The price I have paid is that his reality also shapes me. And yet, I have sworn never to become like him. By following in his professional footsteps, I am indeed making things hard for me.

  Such thoughts ran on like a screechy record in my head one night. Or perhaps many nights. I don’t believe that I thought a lot of them at one and the same time. Perhaps I wondered what my father was doing at that moment, that night. Perhaps I stood at the helm, aware of Eight wandering about, muttering, and perhaps we were on our way to connect with the Sapele pilots while West Africa’s new flame-throwing oil drill towers make life harder for all shipmates and captains.

  I don’t know if my real story begins here in the inky West African night. Perhaps it doesn’t really begin until two days later when I meet my father in Sapele. But since our encounter turned out the way it did, I also want to relate the suppositions and premises. That means that my story must also reach backwards at times.

  When I was standing at the helm outside the river Niger’s delta, I had no inkling that I would see my father again so soon.

  Neither did I know that my indifference had grown to the extent that in just a little while I would let Stockholm jump overboard with my blessing.

  Less than an hour was left until midnight. I was relieved at the helm and swore softly to myself while I danced down the rope ladder to the galley to put on some coffee. I cheered up when I remembered that I did not need to throw out that heavy monster of a pilot ladder. The Sapele pilot and his steersmen climbed aboard using a rope. Why couldn’t all the pilots in the world’s ports learn such a simple trick?

  While the water for the coffee was boiling, I went back out on the deck and stood for a while by the railing. We were almost at the panting light of the buoy. On both sides of us glimmered faint lights from the shore, tiny glowworms in an endless sack of blackness.

  I went back to the galley and poured the coffee, took off the kettle, and ran out to lower a rope to the pilot. That was not necessary. The one-legged pilot stood already on the deck. One of the steersmen was leisurely rolling up the rope with its big hook, and the other had his head over the edge of the deck. He swung himself over the rail without effort. I nodded and they smiled amiably back. Although in the back of my head lived the Islander’s warning about treacherous pirates. Look how simply, quickly, and soundlessly they had reached us with the help of the dory’s large outboard engine. It took them seconds to come aboard.

  Their little demonstration, coupled with the night in Monrovia, reaffirmed my wise decision never again to sleep except when fully awake.

  It was time for the next watch. They would have a few easy hours ahead. No turn at the helm and no lookout. Well inside the river’s wide mouth, we would probably weigh the anchor and wait for the dawn’s early light.

  I went sternward to wake up Stockholm and Vappu, the Finn. The two together were called Light and Dark. Vappu was Light and Stockholm was Dark. Other than the difference in coloring, they were confusingly similar in looks, as if forged in the same mold. Both were broad and large guys with so many muscles that you wondered how they could keep track of them and worried that they would lose any of their playful equipment. Their greatest pleasures were to pump iron and to drink large amounts of jungle juice.

  Stockholm used not to drink more than a glass now and then on special occasions, and since there weren’t many of those aboard, he was almost totally dry. When Vappu came aboard, the picture changed. In contrast to Stockholm, he soaked up jungle juice like a merry sponge. But nothing showed. At most, he would sing some melancholy tune and lift a few hundred extra kilograms of weighty scrap iron. He could drink all night long and yet work his full twelve hours during the day in the suffocating heat, so long as he got something to drink now and then. Since it was not enough for Stockholm to emulate Vappu in their shared athletic interests, he drank, too — and became darker and darker in his moods.

  I had occasion to reflect over their mental states when it became clear that the crew had gathered in Vappu’s cabin. It must have been a special occasion since everybody was yelling, roaring with laughter, and filling glasses to the brim with a rather unctuous vintage smelling of fusel oil.

  It turned out to be Vappu’s birthday. His twenty-second.

  Didn’t that mean that he was two months younger than Stockholm? somebody asked. And couldn’t one see how deterioration had begun in the older one? That was the right of creeping age, certainly, but it wasn’t a pleasant sight to observe a triceps fall down over a biceps.

  In that vein the talk went with veiled puns coined by those from the rival city of Göteborg, while the man from Stockholm, called by the city’s name, slowly developed a face to match his raven black hair. When I entered the cabin, he had taken on an almost deep purple color of resentment and nausea. The latter was because he couldn’t stomach the Islander’s jungle juice very well. Suddenly something boiled over inside his thick head. Brutally, he grabbed Vappu’s friendly waving hand and demanded the Islander as judge supreme, outside of all contests as he was.

  Here would occur a trial of strength. Arm wrestling.

  I have noticed the same tiresome phenomenon thousands of times. I don’t know what secret ingredient there is in alcohol, but it seems always to b
e bringing out two extremely boring kinds of behavior in the entire male species.

  One is an irresistible desire to shake hands with anyone who is to be convinced of something that cannot be explained verbally. As words and whole sentence structures are flushed away by that mysterious substance in alcohol, the shaking of hands increases. It’s as if the intoxicated one, with the help of the ongoing handshakes, wants to pump forward whole oceans of agreeable understanding. If both the handshakers are equally drunk, this looks possible. Never have I seen women shake hands in that way. This is why I have come to the conclusion that there must be some special element in alcohol that only affects men.

  The other behavior is a strong hunger for arm wrestling. It breaks out as some kind of rapidly spreading epidemic in the members of the male sex as soon as they drink alcohol. On the surface, it’s an innocent, harmless contest. But even the most pure-hearted athletes can become entangled in each other pretty much the same way as reindeer bulls do when they measure their strengths head-to-head.

  Light and Dark had long ago become enmeshed in one another. It was high time for arm wrestling. Room was made, in spite of Vappu’s friendly disinterest.

  “No. Shouldn’t start wrestling. It’ll take all night,” he said and smiled.

  But the cabin was filled with human beings who had all the time in the world to watch the duel till the break of dawn if necessary. Vappu sighed and moved forward the bulging tree trunk he called his right arm. Stockholm’s arm already stood there, rooted to the table like an iron bollard, the red and blue tattoos waving threateningly. The Islander counted, and the wrestling began.

  I fell right into a hairy dilemma. Like everybody else, I did want to see this match. But I suspected that this contest of brute strength would take time, probably until far beyond midnight. I ran back to the galley and the coffee, got a cup for the third mate, and hurried up on the bridge with it. The third mate was already there and asked why I and not Stockholm or Vappu came with the coffee. My explanation sounded farfetched since it was true, but he accepted it with the added condition that the two contestants break for a strict sobriety control on the bridge.