The Book of Eels

by Patrik Svensson

  I understood early on that the life Mom and Dad had made for themselves had not been a given. They were both from somewhere else and had ended up where they’d ended up because people like them had been swept along in a process that in three short decades had changed almost everything. It wasn’t individual class mobility, it was collective. Three decades of social reform in Sweden had moved the working class, at least parts of it, from laborer’s cottages and cramped apartments to their own houses, complete with garages, fruit trees, and greenhouses. It had been a mighty movement, like an ocean current.

  Dad was born in the summer of 1947. His mother, my grandmother, was twenty years old at the time and had already been working for more than six years. After seven years in school, she had her Confirmation and then, at the age of fourteen, started working as a maid. The morning after her Confirmation, she rode her bicycle to her first job. She had bought the bike on credit, paying it off in monthly ten-kronor installments. Her salary was twenty-five kronor a month.

  She lived with her parents and five siblings. Her parents were agricultural contract workers who were paid in kind with food rather than money: a whitewashed form of slavery. The family lived in a typical contract worker’s cottage. Three rooms: a kitchen, a bedroom in which all eight members of the family slept—two to a bed—and a parlor no one was allowed in during the day. Outhouse, wood-burning stove, and drafty windows. A violent father. They were people without possessions, and even after the contract worker system was abolished in 1945, they stayed on in the house, living and working much like before. Contract workers knew their place. As did the children of contract workers.

  My grandmother was beautiful in a simple, unpretentious way; she smiled often and had shy eyes with a touch of melancholy about them. She worked as a maid in about ten different households during her teens. Doing dishes, dusting, and so on, from seven in the morning until seven at night. She had Sundays and one afternoon a week off. She slept alone in a maid’s room and she was unhappy—unhappy being a maid, unhappy living as a stranger in other people’s homes, unhappy with the scoldings and contempt and submission. She was constantly homesick, for her sisters and brothers and childhood.

  Right before my father was born, my grandmother moved back in with her parents and found work at the rubber factory in town. She preferred working in the factory to being a maid, but she was also a single parent to a small child. She was given two months of parental leave and then had to go back to work. Her parents and younger sisters were in charge of my father during the day.

  He was seven when he and Nana moved to the farm by the stream.

  It was a tenant farm, owned by the church, with pigs and fields and a garden full of flowers that my grandmother cared for. Dad was put to work on the farm from the start, but he also liked boxing and using a slingshot. He ran across the fields to the stream and learned to swim just above the rapids. He went to school and was interested in history and science but eventually dropped out. He started working, transporting pigs for the abattoir. He did his military service and met mom and got a job as a paver, which he kept until the end of his days.

  While Dad was growing up, Sweden introduced universal child support, income support, and occupational pension. Income taxes had been individualized. Healthcare, maternity care, childcare, and elderly care had all been expanded. Wealth had been redistributed. Two guaranteed weeks of vacation had expanded to four. Society and the state had taken over large sections of the social safety net from families. In other words, it had become possible for a road paver and a day care worker mom, my parents, to live a life that was different in every way from the lives previous generations of the working class had known.

  Nothing about my parents’ life was a given, of course. But nor was it chance. Strong forces had been involved. They had been willow leaves in a mighty current. They had traveled across an ocean without really moving at all.

  Dad was twenty and mom seventeen when they had my big sister. Just a few years later, they took out a loan from the bank and built the white brick house.

  ONE DAY, MY DAD PLACED A LONG, NARROW, STRANGE-LOOKING object made of metal hoops and mesh on the lawn in front of the house.

  “It’s an eel trap,” Dad told me. “I bought it.”

  I don’t know who he bought it from; either way, it wasn’t new; there were several large holes in the mesh, which we mended with sewing thread, but there was something awe-inspiring about it. It was about fifteen feet long, considerably wider at one end and tapering toward a point at the other, and it had two mesh wings by the opening that could be extended out to either side, making it at least ten feet wide. I pictured it on the bottom of the stream, catching everything carried into it by the current. It would be full to the brim with fish. This was something other than setting spillers. This was something that upset the balance of power. With this trap, we would no longer be temporary, unobtrusive guests in the constant cycle of life and activity in the stream; we would be almost omnipotent. It was as though we could now intervene in the fundamental order of things.

  We had dinner and Dad pushed some snus up under his lip and then we were on our way down to the stream while there was still light. We skidded down the slope and drove along the wide tracks, parking by the willow tree. It had been raining for days and the water level was high; the stream was at least a few feet wider than usual and bursting its banks in places, forming small pools of stagnant water, out of which solitary blades of grass protruded.

  Our boat was moored next to the willow tree, tearing at its chain like a trapped animal. Dad stood motionless, studying the murky water rushing by both faster and with more force than usual. “I’ll be damned, the water has risen,” he said and spat in the grass. “All right, let’s give it a try anyway.”

  We’d brought the sledgehammer, two long poles, and one shorter one; we put them and the trap in the boat and pushed off.

  “Want me to row?” I asked.

  “No, I’ll do it,” he replied. “You set it up.”

  He rowed some way into the stream, turned, and started struggling against the current, away from the rapids. The crutches squealed when he heaved at the oars. The current pushed back at every stroke, lifting the prow straight up. He muttered and cursed and leaned his whole body back every time he pulled. After about a hundred yards, he stuck the oars almost straight down and braced with his arms, trying to keep the boat still. It lurched from side to side as if trying to tear free. Dad pumped the oars to parry the movements.

  “Take the long one and bang it into the bottom,” Dad said, nodding impatiently toward the side. Fumbling, I found the pole and plunged the sharp end into the water, pushing it into the muddy streambed as hard as I could. The boat dashed about as though it were trying to buck me, but I managed to reach the sledgehammer and get in some half-decent blows. Brown, dirty water splashed my face.

  We were wet and filthy by the time I’d finally managed to bang down both long poles and tie the wings at the trap’s opening to them. Dad’s face was shiny and he was breathing heavily. He raised the oars and let the boat glide along for a few feet so I could set up the shorter pole as well and tie the tapered end to it. The trap spread out before us, hidden in the murky water, with its opening in the middle of the stream and its mesh bag like a secret room beneath the surface.

  Dad pulled the oars out with a sigh and let the boat float along at will. He spat in the water and looked at the two poles sticking up like the masts of a sinking ship.

  “This should bloody well get us some eels.”

  That night, I fell asleep with images of eels flashing before my eyes. Tons of eels, flashing yellow and brown, crawling around my feet. They were gaping and glaring and gasping for air, struggling to climb up my legs like creepers climbing toward the light. Their eyes were like black buttons.

  The next morning, the water had already subsided a little. Dad was holding the oars, studying the stream. The current seemed to have slowed, the water had cleared, and he didn’t
have to try quite as hard to turn the boat against the current and row toward the trap.

  But we could tell from a distance something was amiss. One of the long poles stood slanted in the water, the other was missing entirely. The whole trap had been pulled along and overturned so the wide opening was pointing downstream instead of upstream, secured now only to the short pole.

  “Damn it!” Dad said.

  He rowed up to the short pole. The trap was swaying this way and that; I yanked the pole up and hauled in the cold, wet mesh, which was covered in dark green plants. The water soaked my trousers, and my hand grew numb; Dad put the oars up and took the trap in silence, tossing branches and large clumps of shiny seaweed overboard, folding the mesh into a pile between us.

  That’s when I spotted it. At the very apex of the narrow end, partially hidden by seaweed, was an eel, writhing sluggishly from side to side. It was the size of a blindworm, just over seven inches long, thin and with tiny black dots for eyes, and I thought that it shouldn’t have had a problem getting out through the mesh.

  It goes without saying it was too small to keep, but we put it in the bucket anyway.

  “I want to bring it home,” I said.

  “What for?” Dad asked. “It’s too small to eat. Better leave it to grow.”

  “I could keep it in the tank, the one in the basement,” I said.

  Dad smiled and shook his head. “An eel as a pet . . .”

  When we got home, I put the tank in my room. It was small, maybe a foot and half across; I poured sand into it, added a big rock, and filled it with water. I dropped the eel into the tank; it sunk to the bottom almost without moving and settled behind the rock.

  I never named it. Over the weeks that followed, the eel just lay there behind the rock, and I sat next to the tank, staring at it through the glass, waiting for it to move, for something to happen, to suddenly see something behind its seemingly dead black eyes. I tried to feed it, dropping small bugs and worms into the water, but it didn’t react. Just lay behind the rock as though hibernating, as though time had ceased to exist.

  I tried to imagine what it saw when it looked out through the glass, what it felt. Was it scared? Was it playing possum? Did it think the world had ended when it was ripped from its usual environment? Could it imagine an existence other than the one it had now?

  After a month, I still hadn’t seen the eel move. It was lying dead still behind the rock. Its tiny gills pulsating gently on the sides of its head, the only sign of life. The water was getting murky. It reeked of decay.

  “It’s not eating,” I told Dad. “It’s going to starve to death.”

  “Oh, it’ll eat when it needs to, I’d wager.”

  “But it’s not moving either. I think it’s dying.”

  A few days later, Dad came to my room and checked the tank. He looked at the filthy water and eel behind the rock, frowned, and shook his head.

  “No, this is pointless.”

  That night, we returned to the stream and I carried the bucket down the bank from the car; by the willow tree, I put it down and picked up the eel. It felt cold and lifeless; I lowered my hand into the water and released it. At first, we were both motionless. Then the eel moved. Its body undulated slowly from side to side, and with gentle motions, it swam back down into the dark and disappeared.

  15

  The Long Journey Home

  An eel, silvery and fat, swims out to the ocean, setting off on its final journey back to the Sargasso Sea. How does it know where to go? How does it find its way?

  When it comes to the eel, we can allow ourselves to ask banal questions, simply because the banal questions don’t always have immediate answers. We can also allow ourselves to welcome this. We should be glad that knowledge has its limits. This response isn’t just a defense mechanism; it’s also a way for us to understand the fact that the world is an incomprehensible place. There is something compelling about the mysterious.

  Because what does it really mean when we say we know the eel procreates in the Sargasso Sea? It means we have good reason to believe this, given Johannes Schmidt spent eighteen years sailing back and forth across the Atlantic, catching tiny, transparent willow leaves. We choose to put our faith in Schmidt’s work, in his observations and conclusions. We believe mature silver eels swim all the way back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, that it’s the only place they breed and that none of them leave there alive. We believe it because everything points to its being true and because no one has offered any plausible alternatives. We can even go as far as saying we know that’s how it is. “We know now the destination sought,” Johannes Schmidt wrote. After all his years on the open sea, he must have felt he had the right to substitute belief for knowledge.

  And yet, in this case, any knowledge comes with qualifications. What we rely on when we say we know where the eel procreates isn’t just observations but also a number of assumptions. And for a person who wants to know for sure, that’s obviously a problem. If you want to be categorical about it, which the scientifically minded tend to want to be, knowledge is not a matter of degrees; it’s binary. You either know or you don’t. Science is much stricter than, for instance, philosophy or psychoanalysis in that regard. Sciences like biology and zoology have on fairly solid grounds clung to the conviction that data need to be empirical and that knowledge requires observation.

  To some extent, that’s the ghost of Aristotle still haunting us. All knowledge must spring from experience. Reality has to be described as it appears to our senses. Only what we’ve seen can be said to be true. It’s an interpretation of how humans acquire knowledge about the world that has survived because it’s logical, but also because it carries within it a promise. Before we know it, we have only faith, but the person with patience is always rewarded eventually. The truth will appear under the microscope.

  When we say we know the eel procreates in the Sargasso Sea, there are still some essential objections to that statement: (1) No human has ever seen two eels mate. (2) No one has ever seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea.

  That means the eel question remains unanswered; the truth has not yet appeared under the microscope. This uncertainty clearly acts as a driving force and a gravitational pull for eel enthusiasts. The mystery is there to be solved, questions await their answers, but at the same time the riddle is what sparks and perpetuates interest. For centuries, people who have viewed the eel question as a problem to solve have at the same time clung almost lovingly to the enigma of it.

  When Rachel Carson wrote about the eel in her fairy tale–like nature book Under the Sea-Wind, she lingered on the mysterious and unexplained. Being a natural scientist, she could have been frustrated by not knowing, but the opposite seems to have been true. Rachel Carson seems to have been drawn to the uncertainty. She approached the eel and nature not just as a scientist but as a human being.

  For instance, about the silver eel’s long journey to the Sargasso Sea, she wrote: “As long as the tide ebbed, eels were leaving the marshes and running out to sea. Thousands passed the lighthouse that night, on the first lap of a far sea journey. . . . And as they passed through the surf and out to sea, so they also passed from human sight and almost from human knowledge.”

  Aristotle, Francesco Redi, Carl Linnaeus, Carlo Mondini, Giovanni Battista Grassi, Sigmund Freud, or Johannes Schmidt might have objected—perhaps they would have been unable to accept that a creature can in fact leave the realm of human knowledge—but to Rachel Carson, there seems to have been something simple and beautiful about the idea of the eels vanishing into the unknown. A creature that actively seeks to avoid human knowledge. As if that’s the way it should be. “The record of the eels’ journey to their spawning place is hidden in the deep sea,” she wrote. “No one can trace the path of the eels.” To her, the eel question, the enduring mystery, seems to have appeared to be preordained and eternal. As though it were a riddle beyond our human comprehension. Like infinity or death.

  Tom Crick, the history teach
er and narrator of Graham Swift’s novel Waterland, clings to the same feeling of a kind of fated inexplicability when he expounds on the eel: “Curiosity will never be content. Even today, when we know so much, curiosity has not unraveled the riddle of the birth and sex life of the eel. Perhaps there are things, like many others, destined never to be learnt before the world comes to its end. Or perhaps—but here I speculate, here my own curiosity leads me by the nose—the world is so arranged that when all things are learnt, when curiosity is exhausted (so, long live curiosity), that is when the world shall have come to its end. But even if we learn how, and what, and where, and when, will we ever know why? Why, why?”

  IN SPITE OF ALL OBSERVATIONS AND ATTEMPTS TO UNDERSTAND (until the end of time), there is thus still a lacuna in the story of the eel. We know silver eels leave in the autumn, when the eel darkness descends, usually between October and December. The tiny willow leaves, the leptocephalus larvae, appear in the Sargasso Sea in the spring; the smallest specimens usually between February and May. Which should mean breeding happens around this time. Which in turn gives us a time frame for the eel’s journey. It has at most six months to get there.

  Yet even so, it’s something of a mystery why the eel sets its course for the Sargasso Sea and nowhere else. Lots of animals migrate for breeding purposes, but few undertake a journey as long and difficult as the eel, and few are as stubbornly fixated on one single place thousands of miles away, and few do it just once before dying.

  There are theories claiming only the Sargasso Sea has the right temperature and salinity for the eels’ propagation. It’s also a fact that eels have been around so long the continents have moved; the first eels likely had a much shorter distance to travel. But as the landmasses of our planet have changed, drifting apart inch by inch over the years, the eel has refused to adapt. It still needs to return to its birthplace, to the exact location it once came from.