My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  Much later I found Ollie’s singsong dialect beautiful. But right then and there, in view of the whole Chinese Wall’s sharply curious eyes, Ollie’s voice sounded horrid. It cut right through the unmerciful light of spring. As if involved in a field maneuver, she stood on the sidewalk and proclaimed what should be saved, what would be brought to the auction place, and what must be thrown out.

  I was given partial satisfaction when she, as determinedly, pointed to a black, shining, enormous Dodge and declared that it constituted the measure of what could be brought along. Let’s face it, Ollie was not beautiful. But she had a fur coat of Persian lamb, permanented frizzy hair, and a black Dodge. I thought of my father with renewed respect. He must indeed be good with women. I slid immediately into the driver’s seat. Such a Dodge had never been in the vicinity of the Chinese Wall. I rolled down the window with cool elegance and asked all the gaping little Chinese to be careful with the veneer of the shiny paint. Then I quickly rolled up the window again so as not to let out too much of that sterling smell of leather.

  All that was left of our old home was in the car. A few suitcases with clothes, books and papers. All the rest was gone. Yet I felt like a king being with Ollie, carried away by the black Dodge. We forgot to inform the pharmacy. I was supposed to give fourteen days’ notice to quit. But I rather believed they could manage without me. If not, there were plenty of nerve pills available. And when they found my various stashed-away basic elements to be used in the manufacture of explosives, they would probably let out a huge sigh of relief. The world was saved. And I with it.

  I stole a furtive glance at Ollie and wondered how long she would stay around. She drove very well. While she drove, she told me the story of her life, from where she came, and how she met my father in Oslo.

  I believed every syllable she uttered.

  For nearly a year I believed her words. And things were generally good. True, Ingemar Johansson lost the match against Floyd Patterson that summer. But other things were happening in the world. I bought myself a moped.

  That was not all. I fell marvelously and incredibly madly in love. That is another story, however. There’s no room for it here.

  I had another reason to take root next to Ollie: I saw neither head nor tail of my father.

  But then came the day when my childhood’s conservative attitude regarding preserving and keeping both human beings and things as they were was completely expelled. It happened to be the same day that two inquisitive gentlemen visited Ollie and me.

  Why was I not attending school?

  Ollie became totally confused. She had believed my statements to the letter. Just like my father, she had taken it for granted that my words were true to the fact. Poor Ollie. She had believed me. Luckily, she had no old stocking around to blow her nose in.

  Even I had gotten used to the lie. I did not understand why the two gentlemen from the educational authorities refused to believe me when everybody else had done so for more than two years. I was finished with that hateful activity they call school attendance. Was this the time to start proceedings against me? When I was nearly sixteen and had a new mother? Back when I was fourteen, I longed for the welfare people to come. Every day. Oh well. That may be a slight exaggeration. But I certainly wouldn’t have objected, had they snuck in and put a few Danish in the cupboard now and then.

  Lucky for me, these two had arrived too late. This was the month I turned sixteen and left the compulsory school age. I didn’t want to stay with Ollie any longer. I went to sea. To hunt for my father. Somehow, somewhere, we would come face to face.

  I wanted to ask him about a very special day.

  My uncle’s tales also made me want to go to sea and lead a sailor’s life. Life ashore wasn’t much fun. The funniest person I knew was my uncle. He was both funny and irresponsible, according to my maternal grandmother, who knows everything. To hear her tell it, my uncle always returned bare-assed after a stretch at sea. I wanted to come home bare-assed, too. I wondered what it would look like. I already knew how to wiggle my ears. My uncle had taught me. The childish spirit was alive in him, although he had been drinking and fighting in the big world. I wanted a lot of tattoos like he had.

  But I also knew that my father would kill me within minutes if he found me covered with tattoos. He had promised as much. And he was a man who kept that kind of promise. Perhaps I would have time to ask my questions, but I would surely be dead before I received any answers.

  My musings in my father’s cabin were interrupted when somebody finally entered. My father. He did not look especially surprised, but there was no reason for that either. We had waved to each other a little more than an hour ago.

  I jumped up from the berth.

  “So you’re here,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We shook hands. When my father shakes hands, he transmits the feeling of being afraid that the other person will get too close to him. Reluctantly, he lets you borrow his hand for a moment. An iron hand on a steel piston, pushing away any vestige of intimacy.

  “For how long are you here?” he asked.

  “How long are you anchored here?” I asked.

  Naturally, he could have said a thousand and one other things. But what was said restored and reestablished the connection with the exchange of words that took place whenever he came through the door after a long absence and greeted us children. The first thing we did was to ask how long he would stay. A rather natural question.

  We wanted to adjust our minds in order to balance our other entertainment against the joy of having a father. Would we gulp him down like gluttons with frantic speed, or would we slowly and deliciously savor him piece by piece? Could we continue to build our toy trucks, climb the scaffolds for the new building, steal apples, or sit quietly reading old comic books down in the cellar? Or should we stick close to him and stare at him long enough to have him fixated in our memory, in case he’d be gone the next day?

  How long would he stay? Our eager questions poured over him. But he would look hurt, brusquely muttering that we could let him get through the door first. He never understood why we asked, and we never understood why he would feel hurt. s

  So here we stand again. Father and son. And I have already learned to dislike the very same question.

  Perhaps both he and I had wanted to say something else. But our questions were given, written beforehand by our history. We had not been handed any more effective lines of dialogue.

  He had already begun to peel off his overalls. A misty breakfast beer was welded into his hand. It did not occur to him to offer me some. I would have liked for him to do that, even if I had declined. But perhaps time stood still inside his head. He had only seen me in glimpses that added up to four years altogether. It might be difficult for him to realize my true age. I tried to stretch myself tall, but he did not seem to notice my impressive height. I was at least half a head taller than he. He was now closer to fifty than to forty, I’m not sure of his exact age.

  In our family, we have never paid much attention to birthday celebrations. My maternal grandmother was considered “the gay dog” in the family. On a totally ordinary Monday, she would bake a cake and whip up some cream. She used to defend this by saying that the milk was too rich so she had to skim off some cream. I had no idea when my father’s real birthday was. I had even less of an idea of his exact age.

  He remained an impressive hunk of a man, almost as broad as he was tall. It would not have mattered if one stood him up vertically or horizontally. When he laughed, it sounded as if someone rolled huge rocks on the floor. Luckily he didn’t laugh very often.

  To have something to say, I told him about Stockholm.

  “We had a guy from Stockholm aboard.”

  “We have at least five.”

  “Eight — our captain — said hello. A real tough son of a bitch.”

  “He’s a shit. We have Hansson. He’s worse. The scourge of the sea. He even inspects the engines.”


  I got stuck. If I had said that our man from Stockholm had jumped overboard, he would probably have insisted that their men from Stockholm had tried to imitate the famous Stockholm massacre of 1520.

  That is a peculiar trait in my father’s personality. If I were to tell him that my feet had grown so that I now take shoe size fourteen, he would counter by saying that his size was twenty-two. I remember that figure — twenty-two — since that was my father’s shirt size. They don’t carry sizes like that, especially not if the sleeve length has to be thirty-two. But I suppose there are not many adults with his peculiarities either. In a way, I ought to be grateful that he was not around that much when we were little. My brother and I would proudly demonstrate our latest construction, a miniature toy truck that we steered with the help of strings, only to receive the tart information that our father used to have an even fancier toy truck, one with a real steering wheel. He seemed to have had everything, done everything, and known everything.

  He lied.

  Why did he lie? Why did he always have to cut us down to a very small size?

  I got angry. In my head roared a number of answers. “I killed our man from Stockholm. He jumped overboard, but I did it. I ordered him to jump.” But out of my mouth escaped only a partly suffocated snuffle. As if I cried saliva instead of tears.

  My father did not look surprised. I have always behaved like a halfwitted fool in front of him. The overalls formed a ring around his feet. I noticed that his stomach was swelling and pushing forward below his freckled chest muscles. He must have weighed more than two hundred pounds. Half a dozen beers a day had taken their toll.

  In his nudity, he radiated clearly the reason for my childhood’s poverty. My mother never grasped what was going on, but after her death I did some research in the family documents in Ollie’s attic. There were boxes, filled with old papers, Mom’s photographs, letters, and documents, including my father’s deduction books for each sea journey. Not until later, when I myself had a couple of those blue deduction books and could decipher the different figures, did I understand the real meaning of my father’s accounts. He kept half the salary for himself and sent the other half home to take care of the whole family. No wonder we had to scrimp at home while he lived grandly aboard the ships. Considering the cheap price of alcohol at sea, he must have poured a lot of it inside himself in the course of each day.

  He had really changed during these four years. His muscles were embedded in fat. He looked like a well-fed pig. It was disgusting —-and, unfortunately, I could not step forward and cut a well-earned slice of ham. The only thing I could do was watch him disappear into the shower and hope that he would scald himself.

  I left.

  During the trip back to the ship, I understood that my state of being tongue-tied in front of this gigantic egotist would remain a permanent one.

  The decision never to see him again was simple to make. I erased him from my memory, together with what I had discovered among the papers in Ollie’s attic. My father did not exist anymore. Dead and buried — so far as I was concerned.

  Alas, Eight did not share this opinion. He stood by the gangway plank and waited for me with his news. Touched all the way to the deepest, darkest corners of his heart by the thought of father and son reunited, he had this bright idea that the two of us should accompany him on an expedition upriver.

  See, there were no tree trunks for us to load. Something had gone awry further up the river. The tugboat that pulled down the timber was inoperative and had been left in some godforsaken hole. So we might as well get up there and repair it.

  “A hut, two goats, and a Dane who sits and cries. That’s what’s up there.”

  He roared with laughter. I did not know if he laughed at the hut, the goats, or the Dane. But I understood enough, namely that most of one’s life is ruled by someone higher than oneself. Sternward the jolly boat was already being lowered into the water. ? motorman had gone over the engine since Vappu’s and my desolate drifting in the river’s mouth. I kept listening with half an ear to Eight’s conversation with the first mate.

  “All we need now are some glass beads to give to those natives,” clucked Eight.

  Our provision dealer piled up ten cases of beer, a bunch of canned goods, and a spirit stove plus a lot of other stuff, hidden in sacks and boxes, right by my feet. This was obviously no afternoon spin we were planning. As bearer, boy, and jump-ashore whatever, I was a uniquely poor specimen. Cautiously, I pleaded the case for Vappu to replace me but received the answer that the jolly boat would sink with three men of that size aboard.

  My father had already been informed over radiotelephone. Eight and I jumped into the jolly boat and picked him up at the gangway plank. We sank a couple of inches deeper when he settled into it with four toolboxes. He looked like an invented character in enormous, flapping shorts and a white, loose shirt. On his head he had placed a dirty straw hat. Under one arm he held on to his rolled-up overalls, tenderly, as if they were a newborn baby. He made room for the toolboxes and carefully placed his overalls between them. The idea was that he would help the Dane to fix the tugboat engine.

  Up the Niger we went.

  Eight navigated and steered. He was in a splendid, playful mood and splashed in the water with his hands.

  “To scare off the crocs!”

  He grinned, lifted up his hand in the glittering sun, and waved the finger stumps. It worked, too, because we did not see a single crocodile during the whole river journey. We probably would not have anyhow. But Eight was happy. With his hand trailing in the water, he told quite a few crocodile jokes. Since there were no monkeys around, he was producing the jungle atmosphere. I suspected that his madness had burst out in full bloom under the white visored cap, but I did not want to bother my father with such nonessentials. He seemed to have a hard enough time dealing with his own problems. Rivers of sweat streaked down his closed face. I sat furthest toward the stem; he sat on the box over the engine. We could have held hands. But he was ignoring me. He was closed up inside his own waterfall. Suddenly he stood up, the boat lurched dangerously, and Eight roared that my father should sit down.

  “I have to go ashore!”

  Surprised, Eight shouted: “Why the hell would you want to do that?”

  “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”

  It was clear that my father would not sit down until he got his way. The boat rocked. We had no more than eight inches of freeboard left. Eight sighed and looked around, I pointed toward a dry piece of sand between the thick roots of huge trees and jumped ashore when the bow made contact. What I had taken for sand was a kind of yellowish, corny sludge. I sank down to my knees. Wise from earlier experience, proving that everything always gets worse, I hung on to the boat, unable to take even one step away from it. A jungle marsh like that could swallow a whole freighter, crew and all. And a small, inexperienced sailor would be gobbled up without leaving a trace.

  Then there was this powerful splash beside me. I shut my eyes. Could there be crocodiles in the river?

  No, it was my father, who had jumped in. More than two hundred pounds straight down into the sludge and with one toolbox in his hand for a little extra weight as if he had intended to make a hole right through West Africa. He waded along, mud pouring into his pockets, and disappeared behind some big trees. When I peered over the edge of the boat, Eight seemed totally confused. That was unusual. Most of the time, he managed to keep things under control in his rough way. He turned to me with a helpless gesture.

  “Where’s Johansson going?”

  It sounded weird when Eight called my father Johansson. As if my father were a stranger. But then I remembered that my last name was also Johansson. Ingemar Johansson. After this adventure they would have to give me a new name aboard. From Strangler to Jungle Johansson. Anyhow, right now the Johansson Eight referred to was my father.

  “Where’s Johansson going?”

  Eight repeated his question while I crawled aboard. “To the toi
let,” I answered.

  If you ask my father where he is going and he answers the way he did, he must be headed for the nearest toilet. Simple as that. But Eight couldn’t know that. He looked skeptical.

  “With the toolbox?”

  “Perhaps he carries toilet paper in it,” I suggested.

  Eight made his way over to Johansson’s toolboxes. As commander and supervisor of the crew’s alcoholic habits, he knew better. Two of the toolboxes contained beer. The third was filled with actual tools. Now it was not difficult to figure out why Johansson had been holding the fourth toolbox carefully high over his head when he waded away between thick tree roots. Eight snorted like an enraged water buffalo. I understood perfectly well why. With friendly generosity he had loaded ten cases of Tuborg beer in preparation for a pleasant trip with good conversation about the old days. But my father could not fathom such generosity. Johansson knew only himself — and now he stood behind a broad tree trunk and drank beer in secret.

  “Perhaps he didn’t see the cases with beer.” I tried to make my voice cheerful and encouraging. “Maybe he thought the beer was for the Dane.”

  Eight glared suspiciously and removed one beer cap with his teeth.

  “Take one yourself, Johansson.”

  “Ingemar,” I said and tried imitating him in biting off a beer cap.