My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  “As soon as that whorish kid gets married, we’ll close shop and renovate the house. But we’ll keep the jukebox. It’s nice to have music.”

  After those words I was not sure that I liked Bengtsson anymore. But he was my passport to visiting Madame Lajard.

  When we came back down to the harbor, I used to practice moving the ship away from the quay, just using my hands. It was hard. But occasionally I had a feeling that it did move.

  It was after such an exercise that I found my cabin mate in a sorry state. The sailor from the north of Sweden had shaved his head. It was ineptly and sloppily done. Blood dripped from his face and neck. If he had no hair, he said, it couldn’t fall out. We discussed the pros and cons of the method for a while. I had read that natural baldness was a sign of intelligence. The brain is able to grow larger since all the hair that is to grow out is being stored in the skull, like a ball of yarn. When the supply runs out and there is no more to grow, there is more brain space. I was joking of course.

  The sailor was in no mood for my philosophical nonsense. He ran off with the idea of throwing himself overboard. Several of us were able to subdue him.

  He was sent home. We got a Dane in his place. He was one year older than I, a strong, flaxen-haired type with a handsome and thoroughly false face. All he had to do was stick his head out of a porthole to make the whole quay look like a rallying point for lovesick idiots. Of both sexes. But he never seemed to notice anything. The crew had told me in various details about the Mediterraneans’ attitude about affairs of love. Everyone talked about their sexual freedom. As long as each one kept within their own territory. The warnings were clear and written in stone — it was important not to stick your ass out in North African ports. Even Bengtsson with his porcelain eye and iron fists would now and then sniff the air like a frightened dog. Love between men lay threateningly and obvious all around us.

  I had heard so many tales about the North African ports that I often jumped high in the air in pure terror as soon as I saw more than two Arabs at the same time. There were excellent reasons to stay close to Bengtsson’s enormous fists.

  The Dane on the other hand seemed to sail on a totally different ocean. He felt that the two of us should go out and find our own adventures. He had already accompanied us to Madame Lajard and met Julie when he suggested that we find some fun of our own elsewhere. If I entertained any hope of conquering Julie, it was time for a little on-the-job training.

  I did not require a lot of convincing.

  We snuck ashore in Algiers and wove through the barricades in the harbor. If the general situation in Algeria was tense, it nonetheless appeared to be under control.

  We arrived at a bar. The Dane ordered some beer and we began discussing the evening’s strategy. That took considerable time. We kept on drinking beer. The evening passed in tingling anticipation.

  When it was time for the next move, we became painfully aware of our ignorance. We knew of no good addresses. We agreed to ask some guys next to us at the bar. They were dressed in civilian clothes. But their crew cuts and shaved necks were as telling as field uniforms. Nice guys. Probably officers, since they were allowed to be out of uniform. We struggled through with sign language and the most essential words from our meager vocabulary. Soon a brotherhood sprang up between us and the three Frenchmen who, as luck would have it, shared our exact intentions.

  More beer was ordered. Glasses were raised. Laughter floated in the air and everything was perfectly clear. I suppose I was the only one who was nervous. To become a seasoned sailor was a major turning point in one’s life, after all.

  A little later we drove through the city in the Frenchmen’s car. Algiers is not a large city. You could miss most of it if you are full of beer and dozing off. Large parts of the city were in darkness. We laughed and toasted each other. The three French guys tried doggedly to teach us a children’s song. But that was hopeless. The Dane sat in the back with two of the guys and I sat up front beside the driver. That was my good luck — and rotten luck for the Dane. When the car stopped with screeching brakes, he cried out that we should run. But it was too late.

  The two in the back dragged the kicking Dane across the sand. Through the side window of the car I could see the ocean and the black horizon. I sat as motionless as my buddy in the front seat wanted me to. The machine gun between his hands was no joke. He grinned and pushed me out. I fell and crawled under the car. From above me I heard the Frenchman’s clucking laughter. I understood him. Trying to hide underneath the car was futile. As soon as they were through with the Dane, I was next on their agenda. Could I possibly bury myself in the sand?

  I had to face this whole situation soberly. I was stuck, I was unbelievably and unforgivably stupid, and I would never again in my life associate with Danes.

  I crawled out from under the car.

  The kind of love the soldier intended to force upon me was giving me cold sweat. I fabricated a huge smile for him. He put the machine gun on the hood of the car, and we walked into the black night.

  As soon as we were out of the cones of light created by the car’s headlights, I started to run in a wide circle to lure him as far as possible away from the car in order for me to get back to it first.

  It worked. But the machine gun was no longer on the hood.

  Had it fallen off?

  I clawed frantically in the sand for the bluish weapon. I can see every detail of that night in front of me with horrible clarity. It’s like a dance macabre.

  A hand grabs hold of my leg. The Dane stands a small distance away. The car’s headlights illuminate his face, swollen from crying. The machine gun doesn’t sound real. Just a faint pop. The soldier who had pulled at my leg stares in frozen astonishment toward his stomach area and falls headlong into the sand. The other two come rushing forward with crooked smiles and outstretched hands. The Dane whirls around. It looks as if the two soldiers had been slashed right through the middle. They fold up and fall. I crawl forward and reach into the car. When the headlights go off, we are able for a moment to believe that nothing at all has happened.

  The Dane’s sobs sounded as if his lungs were trying to force their way out through his mouth. Slowly, everything fell silent. Both of us were waiting for some kind of reaction from somewhere. For us the last few seconds had been hours of noise and roar.

  Nobody arrived. The beach remained quiet and empty. The Mediterranean kept heaving, as indifferent as before. And the Dane did exactly what I did. We crawled on the ground and touched the three soldiers. They were dead. We began to giggle hysterically at our impulse to crawl, as if the ground itself would split open if we stood up. Finally we sat there, leaning against the car. What should we do?

  Having talked it over for a while, we arrived at our conclusion.

  We would bury the three corpses in the sand and drive the car to Algiers. If we left the bodies where they were, questions would be asked quicker and somebody might recall seeing us together in the bar. The Dane’s flaxen bangs were not easy to forget. Neither one of us had any desire to explain matters to the French military police. We had had more than our fill of French soldiers.

  The trunk space in the car was filled to the brim with equipment. Weapons, boxes with explosives and wires — things that any comic book-reading child would recognize even in faint moonlight. Among the tools, we picked out a collapsible spade.

  The Dane got the shivers. He shook like a leaf and did not want to dig. He finally came over to the pit and we both started digging.

  After a little more than an hour, the surface of the beach was as smooth as before. We started back. I drove. Ollie’s black Dodge used to have a magical attraction for me. She would let me drive, as long as I drove the car at home in the yard. That training came in handy now.

  We parked the car in a dark alley and found our way down to the harbor. I’ll never understand how the Dane managed to get the machine gun aboard the ship. We sat and worked with it in our cabin, taking it apart with complete
concentration. Neither one of us was ready to admit what was going on inside us, but we were both terrified and had trouble sleeping.

  During the night, the Dane was sobbing loudly in his upper berth.

  I decided to forget the whole event. If Bengtsson could concentrate hard enough to see with an artificial eye, I ought to be able to erase what had happened.

  It worked rather well. The problem was the Dane. He had far bigger a problem than I. On the way down to Casablanca, he drank more and more and wanted to jump overboard. It’s no easy task to speak seriously about life with a Dane, but I tried as best I could. He kept on crying, declaring that he no longer believed in life. As I was consoling him, I soon began to sound like my confirmation pastor back in Småland. Centuries of hollow clichés popped into my head, as if they had always been there, waiting for the fitting occasion.

  I finally managed to put him to bed.

  He was crying and I kept holding his hand.

  While I thought he would be grateful to me, to my astonishment, he arose the next day out of his berth like a demonic killer. It was my scalp he was after. He hated me. I had witnessed his fear and his humiliation. He could not stand that.

  In Casablanca we waited in the roadstead to get to the quay. Again the Dane loaded himself up with beer, following my every move with black glances. After a few hours he was so heated and unstrung that he grabbed the first weapon he saw and started chasing me all around the ship. We had happened to stand in the mess room so he grabbed a bread knife.

  “Help!” I cried, running for my life.

  On the bridge stood Hawk smelling of breath mints and aftershave. I ran right past him and out on the other bridge wing with the Dane in close pursuit. You get the strangest impulses when you run for your life. It wasn’t until I ran down to the deck again that it hit me that Hawk probably had reasons for smelling deliciously all the time. I turned, running up again to check it out. I was right. The cloud of after-shave and mint also contained a faint smell of alcohol. Oh well, he had been nice and had taught me to navigate. What a pity that I would never be a third, second, or first mate myself. Meanwhile, the Dane was gaining on me. He was both broader and taller than I. The tip of the bread knife tickled the back of my neck. It was at that precise moment that I swore never again to save anyone insisting on jumping overboard. That was it for me and brotherly love.

  The weirdest thing of all was that the crew seemed to take the Dane chasing after me with a knife high in the air as some kind of entertainment. I had to save myself as best I could.

  In the end, Bengtsson intervened. Putting himself right in front of the Dane, he stared him down with his porcelain eye. The whole thing was cleared up for the moment. The Dane promised to stop drinking beer. One more knife fight and he would be put ashore.

  But I was left sharing the cabin with him and having to spend the nights with him on the upper berth. Mostly I lay awake, waiting for the Dane to jump down and strangle me.

  After a series of tense and sleepless nights, the Dane finally asked for forgiveness and we became friends again. As time and the ship went on, the episode with the three French soldiers paled. We never spoke of it. Now the Dane wanted to come along with me and the bosun to Madame Lajard’s place.

  Blond and handsome as he was, I had early on felt that he couldn’t be trusted. He made both women’s and men’s heads turn. And he had a blind spot in the middle of his skull. Once he got hold of an idea, he could neither hear nor see.

  My love for Julie had manifested itself in a few quick touches. But most of the time I sat dreaming by the jukebox, waiting for the bar to close, the customers to be thrown out, and Madame Lajard and Bengtsson to retire. I had become used to this routine and had gotten into the habit of nodding off in order to have strength later for what might develop. The truth was that I only slept a few hours each night and welcomed that short catch-up nap. My salary was the lowest aboard and my hours of overtime were the highest in number. About an average of fourteen hours most days. This said, it was a mistake, I know, to fall asleep in front of Julie.

  That evening, I woke up as usual. The bar was closed. Madame Lajard and Bengtsson had already retired behind the curtain. The jukebox was glimmering and the loud sound of music covered the creaking of the iron bed as well as Madame Lajard’s cooing and moaning. Julie, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. I was debating at the bar on what to drink to restore my vitality.

  I then heard noise coming through the open window. The shutters were closed. Peering out through the slitted openings between the slats, I spotted Julie lying across one of the rough beams that supported the building. The Dane was standing behind her.

  Stumbling out alone over railroad tracks and past dark shacks, I was making my way back to the ship. Bengtsson could use the Dane as guide and support if he wanted. And sure enough, at dawn they arrived unsteadily, arm in arm, singing. I took the machine gun and let it fall between the ship and the edge of the quay. Hearing the splash, the two of them hobbled over to the edge to look down.

  Bengtsson, taking an unsteady step, tilted his head far back in order to be able to see me.

  “Right. You’re learning. But you’re slow.”

  The Dane confided much later that he had paid Julie. But I understood that because I had witnessed the Dane’s humiliation, he wanted to see mine. And not just this time, but again and again. Julie would not be enough. I waited, refusing to go ashore, even with Bengtsson.

  “You’re poor,” I told Bengtsson. “You might as well burn those pieces of paper.”

  “I know that,” he answered. “I just wanted to teach you a little math. It’ll come in handy.”

  Here I had spent many and fruitless hours going through the figures in his black book and all he had in mind was to teach me math. I no longer understood people. How many kinds did actually exist in the world?

  The fate of the Dane was turning sad. He became wilder and wilder. He could not erase from his mind as easily as I our Algerian episode. He continued to chase me with knives, iron bars, or what other loose object he could find. It was tiring. So much so that one evening I stopped and just stood there, offering him my throat. Swinging the knife he slashed my pullover. Discovering that there was a human being beneath so stunned him he lost his balance, dropped the knife, and disappeared.

  That same evening — we were in Marseilles — we heard a tremendous bang against the ship’s outer side. Along with the rest of the crew, I ran up on deck and peered out over the deserted quay. What had happened? The only one who could not be found was the Dane. After a while we grew tired of speculation and returned to our berths.

  Morning arrived with some commotion on the quay. ? forklift had disappeared during the night. We stared at the distance between the quay and the ship. Not more than half a yard, and yet the forklift and the Dane had managed to fall through it. Only I understood what he had attempted to do. While I kept struggling trying to move the ship Bengtsson’s way, by concentrating my own strength, he had to get some help. Cheating as usual. A diver confirmed the suspicions and brought up the Dane, from whose long, blond hair Bengtsson picked off some slimy seaweed. The consulate negotiated for transportation home. A few plastic bags were wrapped around him and the Dane was put in cold storage.

  Of all places on this earth, I signed off the ship in the small town of Köping, Sweden. We arrived with desert sand, wriggled into the sweet water of the lake Målaren through the sluice in Södertälje, and ended up smack in the middle of Sweden. Nobody found that especially remarkable. I was the only one who had not yet learned my lesson.

  Boatswain Bengtsson stood by the railing and waved good luck. I would need it. The mess boy and I had bought a few turtle babies in Casablanca. They were hid under my sweater and chafed against my stomach as I was squirming through a hole in the fence to avoid going through customs. That hole had been made by others smuggling alcohol and cigarettes.

  Just a few yards on the other side of the hole the customs officers drove up in
their black car. Starting to run, I stumbled and fell on my stomach. The customs officers looked pleased. They had finally caught a live one. I pulled out the flattened turtles from under my sweater. Disappointed, the customs officers drove off. They would have a funny story to tell. It’s not every day somebody tries to smuggle in something that is perfectly legal to bring into the country.

  Bengtsson was still standing by the railing, looking at me as I was throwing the dead turtles in a ditch, and walked away. I decided there would be no more ships and no more sea for me, not ever. It took me seven years to live up to that decision. There have been many times since then when I thought of Bengtsson, trying to recreate his ability to concentrate.

  SWEDEN

  1976

  I drive from Marseilles to Sweden through the affluence of Europe in amazement. What I had taken for granted before my stay in Algiers now appears abnormal. I look upon the isolated opulence of Sweden with shame and even guilt.

  While the pictures of my teens fade, bit by bit, they have helped me understand how much I have missed my father and how often I had been trying to find him in other older men. Now, after the breakup with Louise, I am on my way home to my son. What am I going to do for him?

  A year ago, Jonas and I had gone fishing together. We had collected enough worms and were walking along the pebbly lane. I was ahead, carrying the thick end of the fishing rod of bamboo. Jonas was following, holding on to the thin end. I would sneak a look back at Jonas’s damp and expectant face.

  I was aware of looking at my own childhood in his questioning eyes. Combined with my memories, he was now an evaluating center that was weighing me down with guilt. Was his future being destroyed by his parents’ selfish and unreasonable demands?

  He was looking at me as I once had looked at my father, and I found it difficult to sustain.