My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  “That’s no fun. You’re always saving yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I received no answer. Her colleagues were descending upon us, polite but also a little embarrassed as if we had caught each other playing some inappropriate game in the sandbox. They commiserated with me on my illness. I wondered how much they knew but did not dare ask them to be more specific. Oh yes. I had been ill for several months. You do vegetate and waste away in the hospital. It felt good to move around a bit before sober and serious reality set in.

  I did not listen attentively to Mattson’s explanations during the guided tour. He was a small, fat man with an eager bounce. Sweat poured out of him. He reminded me of close-ups in poorly made pornographic movies. You are supposed to participate in the general excitement but boredom sets in. When Mattson spoke about his life’s greatest research project, I felt exhausted.

  “Five million!”

  I smiled. “An impressive sum.”

  “Yes. Isn’t it?”

  It was impossible to stop him. The idea was that the desert inhabitants should build up an oasis the traditional way. More springs must be discovered for a steady flow of water. Wells had to be dug, twenty yards straight down in the sand, and the water guided for miles by ancient methods to the largest vein, where it would be divided by a simple but ingenious measuring system. A “comb” of wood was lowered into the water groove to split up the water in several flows. Every family’s water ration, depending on family size, number of camels and date palms, was regulated by the holes in the “comb.” The researchers were as enamored of this thousands-of-years-old system as they were disdainful toward Erik’s computers, machines, and concrete walls.

  But Mattson was deeply concerned about the natives’ delaying-action attitude toward the venture. He had come to realize that the desert inhabitants had been collected by an official in the Algerian state machinery. The few genuine desert people were rebels. The majority around here were in fact city folks. One might assume them to be political undesirables.

  Mattson’s frantic optimism was a smoke screen to hide his fear. He did not dare formulate the simple truth: He was the unwilling chief warden of a prison camp. One of the few in the group who knew several Arabic dialects, he was far from stupid but perhaps blinded by the size of his research grant. Now his allotted desert people had demanded a regular water pipe with a faucet from the dam construction, while they kept digging for water in the correct, ancient way in the hostile desert. Erik had granted Mattson’s desperate plea. He even let a truck dump sand over the mile-long pipe, rendering it invisible, charging the cost of labor to the researchers.

  Then some friendly soul had pointed out that the date palms in the hopelessly dried-out old oasis had been dead for a long time and would never bear any fruit. It was only thanks to Erik’s pipes that anything green grew. In pure desperation, Mattson had set half of his desert inhabitants cutting down the dead palm trees, thereby destroying the protection from the northern wind. The sand moved in over the oasis in huge drifts. A few stiff-jointed camels had been chained to the tree stumps in the hope that they would take over the role of windbreak. The camels kept complaining with stubborn, hoarse voices. Some of the Swedish researchers were not used to hearing the nightly crying of such large animals and were becoming “increasingly nervous,” Mattson said.

  He was solidly enthusiastic on the surface but on the brink of collapse underneath. I’m used to it. I have a special kind of magnetism that attracts madmen and nervous breakdowns. No crying camels are needed around me to make people jittery.

  It started with my mother. She fell ill the moment she saw me.

  So Mattson talked and talked, all the time looking ready to run away.

  We were sitting in his trailer, a combination of office, living quarters, and a place to shower. Lately it had become an outlet for feverish union activity among the other researchers. They elected a representative who made demands, and formal negotiations were carried out. Again the sociologists had to turn to the dam construction engineers. Erik could deliver especially developed housing units by air from Sweden. All this meant that Mattson had spent millions on his research project before even one drop of water had been brought to the oasis according to plan.

  In spite of his problems, he poured whiskey for us and was extremely friendly. A frightening individual. Quite like me a few months ago, wrapped up in artful self-betrayal and going through with something unbelievably idiotic. After a few glasses, his flattery regarding my field of research was forming dry sand around my feet and threatening to suffocate me. Did he think I still received invitations to the prime minister’s informal get-togethers? Though scandals in academic circles have a tendency to spread quickly, my mistakes might have been less important than I had thought. Unless Louise had spilled the beans, the news of my self-inflicted fall from grace could not have reached the desert.

  I was beginning to understand why Louise had felt this unexpected need of me. Even camels cried in this false oasis.

  Her inserted asides during Mattson’s verbal enthusiasm slowly lent a satirical glow to the whole thing. Though it could be said that I was throwing rocks while in a glass house, I could not refrain from criticizing Mattson.

  “But what’s the use?” I asked quietly.

  Below the mountain range, the white desert sand shimmered. The window of the trailer was open. Raggedy clouds presented a shadow play on the sandy surface.

  “Acquisition of knowledge,” Mattson said as if this fashionable pseudo-scientific phrase fully explained the need to set a number of millions rolling.

  “So you can tell the people of the desert that they really know what they already know?”

  Mattson, not quite as friendly now, pointed at me with a plump finger.

  “You question everything and everyone. But that large dam construction over there will make the hidden knowledge of the people disappear! It will erode and disintegrate in proportion to the number of water pipes and faucets. Soon no human being alive will know how to care for camels. We’re going to build a factory here soon. Camel cheese. Have you heard of it?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “When I was at sea. As a joke. The Arabs have known for thousands of years that you can’t make cheese out of camel’s milk. That kind of knowledge doesn’t disappear. You call their knowledge hidden only because you can’t grasp it. It’s the sociological researcher’s usual trick. Nothing exists until we have formulated it.”

  He got so mad that he literally threw me out of the trailer. A few of the false desert inhabitants flapped by in their djellabas and disappeared.

  “That was fun! In the old days I’d have felt responsible for your behavior. Now I don’t care,” said Louise, who had followed me out of the trailer.

  Whereupon she disappeared, only to reappear between a couple of dead date palms. She turned and walked away on the white sand. I followed her, humming to myself. I knew my Louise. Her downcast and tragic figure was partly due to her feeling increasingly ill at ease in this oasis of self-delusions. She had needed me for affirmation. My task was to blow the whistle when she left the ship. Her thanks would be my reward.

  To make love in the Sahara below the moon’s jolly old man’s face was a perfect illustration of our reunion, I thought cheerfully and trotted on in her footsteps.

  Less than a mile away was a halfway demolished pile of rocks. Louise explained what a marabout’s living quarters had looked like. The remains of the construction, hardly tall enough for a man, revealed that it could have been both a burial place and a temple in memory of a holy man.

  “Splendid,” I said.

  I lifted her up a little against the dismantled rocks. The old man in the moon was grinning down at us. And she let me slide inside her. Her legs pressed like iron bands against the small of my back, and it was over before we had even grasped what we were doing. I sank down on the ground, leaning against the warm stone wall. For a brief moment, the different time and space concepts wer
e uncovered and clear. The world with Louise and Jonas came together in the palm of my hand. The other hand amused itself by drawing abstractedly in the sand. As always it turned out to be a floor plan of a house. I keep drawing ideal abodes for my family. My life having been a constant move, the floor plans are some kind of contemplative pitching of a tent. I am drawing that which will never be a reality.

  When I met Louise, my philosophy was simple: It is difficult to give up a chest of drawers that you have never had. Exactly! From early childhood, the idea that my clothes would forever and ever be in the one and same place seemed an illustration of complete security. To Louise, such a desire was a petty bourgeois contamination. The institution of family was the true center of the plague, the enemy, when we examined our lack of freedom. The paradox was that she wanted to get married anyhow. Consequently both she and I are paradoxes. What I struggle to reach, she struggles to give up. Our backgrounds guide us. Mine is the autodidact’s mental fox trap, where a kind of double vision develops. To conquer the world means to conquer or be conquered by the bourgeois culture. The harsh criticism of oneself flourishes. What have I really done other than travel as far from my background as possible? I belong to orderliness. And the orderliness reigns.

  Just as in the Sahara. At least within my field of vision.

  I fumbled lazily for Louise to show her the plan for the house, but she was gone. On the other side of the pile of rocks rose an enormous sand dune. Her footprints seemed to lead toward the end of the world. I hurried after her. She was standing a small distance away on the other side. Her body was arched in ecstasy against her own hand, hidden underneath the thin dress. Her face was closed, contracted and concentrated. It wouldn’t have surprised me had fangs suddenly glinted between the pulled-back lips. It was such a total and sensuous pleasure in its complete, closed-off loneliness that neither I nor any other man could possibly gain entrance into her kind of inner world. The light of the moon was soiled by quickly passing clouds. It turned black and then again sparklingly white. She had fallen, her body bent around her own arm.

  I slid back into the running sand.

  An image of my mother flashed, as if superimposed with that of Louise and then as a dull sorrow about which one can do nothing.

  I had snuck into my maternal grandmother’s huge pantry, where my mother used to rinse herself with salt water from the ocean that we children carried home in bottles. Most of the other time, she was lying very still, very sick. I was perhaps six years old, and it was the first and only time I saw my mother nude. Her pleasure was intense below the sprinkling sun-warmed ocean water. She played and enjoyed herself, liberated from us. From me. I could never give her what a simple bottle of seawater could. I and my siblings, the whole world — everything was rinsed away and obliterated.

  Back at the ruins of the marabout’s holy place, I erased my ideal family house floor plan in the sand. Our meeting had not been an affirmation but a farewell.

  When she came sauntering down after what seemed an eternity, everything was over between us.

  “Good,” she said and kissed my cheek lightly.

  “Can’t we remember something that was fun?” I wondered. “You remember our wedding —-that was fun!”

  “Sure. I had a miscarriage a few weeks ago. I was pretty far gone. That was fun, too. Everything is fun to you.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  Louise told me how Erik had personally driven her to the nearest hospital and then taken her to the construction camp and forced her to rest. She had not wanted to disturb me since I was preoccupied with a chewed-up turtle and a mad dog. Slowly she and Erik had come to like each other. They had decided to live together as soon as he had finished his contract. He was divorced and had a daughter the same age as Jonas.

  “How perfect. My son in an alcoholic family.”

  “Erik’s changing. And I’m going to start working as a family counselor.”

  “Isn’t that putting the wolf as shepherd?” I asked.

  The thought appealed to me, however. After our seven years, Louise must have enormous funds of knowledge. After seven years of marital rounds, Ingemar Johansson throws in the towel. I have always said that Louise ought to be a cartoon. She always comes up with the utterly unexpected. She is ahead in time before it can look back and reflect upon itself. I myself was a totally lost cause, stuck in the past and longing for a perfect future. As a small child, I wanted to be old. The whole idea of life scared me. If only one somehow could skip it without dying.

  “What did you mean when you said that I always save myself?”

  “You’ve never been loved. So you’ve spent all your years loving yourself. That’s the whole thing.”

  “Help yourself and God will help the others, as my father used to say.”

  “Like father, like son.”

  “The last time I went to sea, my father and his father drove me to Stockholm. Somewhere along the road, the three of us found ourselves standing there, pissing, in a grove. Yes, indeed, here stand three generations pissing, I thought.

  “My father started it, illustrating the male Swedes’ fear of using sentimental or highfalutin adjectives.

  “ ‘And the fucking sparrows squeak,’ my father commented.

  “ 6And the goddamn sun shines,’ I said.

  “I thought he’d notice the irony. But then my grandfather muttered, ‘Hell, it looks as if the damn summer is coming this year, too.’

  “Every time I drive past that grove, I see it as a monument to three generations’ inability to express their emotions. Have I told you about my meeting with my father in West Africa? He stood aboard a ship in Sapele when we dropped anchor.”

  Louise smiled and lay down in the sand.

  “Oh yes. Many times. But tell me once more. Do that instead of asking who was the father of my baby. Or how I feel. I asked you to come here in a moment of weakness because I thought you were the father. You could have been. But we’ll never know now. It’s too late. Tell me about your father instead. He’s a wonderful excuse for you being what you are. Which version will you choose? Do you kill him dead or not?”

  Louise was calm and strangely distant. Normally she would have thrown heavy candle holders, urns, or books at me while supplying me with her opinions. I grabbed the chance and told once more the story of the meeting with my father. It couldn’t hurt. I thought I did it rather well. Had I been Louise, I would have decided on the spot to give me all the love I had missed.

  “The only emotion you’re familiar with is a feeling of loss,” Louise said and stood up. “And that loss you have indeed recouped. I suppose that’s why you’ve been unfaithful in such a tremendously predictable way. How many women have you really slept with since we got married? If you at least had enjoyed it, I’d have said nothing. But now I’m tired of it. Go home to Jonas. Go home and take care of our son.”

  Never had Louise been more beautiful than at that moment. She disappeared over the dunes. Perhaps she would walk all the way to Erik. I leaned against the holy man’s burial place and wondered how things had been between him and his women. Perhaps he had as much fun at his wedding as I had.

  HOW IT ALL ENDED

  or

  The Marriage to Louise

  Our wedding had indeed been a remarkable affair. We were two children getting married, two children who had fooled each other completely. The first meeting aboard the train cemented our relation. We became fixated in parts neither of us could play. Completely dumbstruck, I had listened to Louise, a wonderfully amoral love priestess telling about her sexual debaucheries. I suddenly became repressed and shy — cold sweat was breaking out all over — just thinking of myself once making my first entrance to the world between the legs of a woman and now topping it off by having to go back in there.

  I think the meeting with Louise was about sudden and complete love. Everything that I had been was demolished. I disappeared, as if in a black hole, before I even touched her. The problem with me, as my brother
used to explain when we were children, was that I tend to think too much. Already then, I saw love as an eternal birth struggle. What if one got stuck and couldn’t get away?

  Ever since I was thirteen, I had been struggling with my infatuations. Before long, I was a very tired and disillusioned man, who, at the age of twenty-three, met Louise.

  What was it really that took place?

  Total blindness? Small brain hemorrhages in both of us? How could we get so excited about the parts we chose to play? Louise presented herself as a totally instinctive volcano, happily rolling around in sin and sensuous pleasures. I fell willingly into the part of the frail piece of wood, accidentally falling into the volcano and burning up.

  We got engaged, became pregnant, and married, all at a speed that would have broken a tabloid writer’s fingers on the typewriter keys. It was a civil ceremony. Louise had a grandiose stomach, I a chalk-striped suit, and my in-laws nervous tics in their benevolent smiles. I sympathized with their difficulty in accepting that Louise, a girl from a good family, was marrying a simple sailor. That’s how they were seeing me. I didn’t even have golden stripes on a handsome uniform. Such a comparison was close at hand since Louise had a cousin who had married a sea captain. It was the presence of this handsome idiot that made Louise begin to talk, extremely loudly, about my moral excellence.

  “He’s been at sea for seven years and never been with a whore! Isn’t it fabulous! I mean, we’ve all heard about sailors and bordellos and whores!”

  The timing was perfect for the orchestra to stop playing dance music. Louise has a peculiar way of formulating words that deal with the sphere of sexuality. The words shape themselves as huge capital letters in her gap and roll smoothly out over her lips. No mumbling at all for her. With her strict religious upbringing as the bouncing mat for everything that the rest of us try to hide, things fly out of her with orgiastic factualness.