Europa Blues

11

FOR FIVE DAYS now, he had been travelling. It felt like a lifetime. In a way, it was. But now he understood that his wandering was coming to an end. A transformation was about to take place.

The presence was stronger now. It had started to feel more physical, like an old friend he had been waiting for for a long time. More than fifty years. Two old, very old men, meeting one another halfway, each from their own side of a page covered with scribbles. It was as though he was about to arrive, to come home.

And someone was waiting for him there.

Waiting with unswerving loyalty.

It was all pictures now. They were rippling through him. It was the river of death; he needed to evoke them to be able to cross, to be given permission to die. All he needed now was a ferryman. That was who was waiting for him. That was who would guide him to the other side. He wouldn’t stop until he reached the bottom of the funnel. Though anything was better than wandering, being forever unburied on the banks of a river which didn’t exist. The wandering of Ahasver. But now the river was there. The eternal suffering could begin.

He was looking forward to it.

Every now and then, he managed to look up from the flood of images. To catch his breath. A chance to recall his route during those five days. Each day’s travel formed a letter. The first had been ‘E’, an upper-case ‘E’. The second day’s journey was a ‘P’, that was what he had worked out.

The images were relentless. There wasn’t much time to look up. The tidal wave washed over him but the story failed to emerge. The pictures didn’t fit together. There was no order to it. As soon as any kind of order appeared, he would be ready. Then he would no longer need to travel.

There were arms on top of him, legs on top of him, thin, thin legs, thin, thin arms. He was moving through a pile of people. Dead people. One of the dead people is a man without a nose and he is lying on the floor of a living room in Tyresö; a hand clutching a kitchen knife pulls back and the blood flows from beneath the man without a nose, and on the wrist by the knife there are numbers in movement, on their way away from him.

He is upside down and a metal wire is being forced into his temple and he feels no pain, though he should be feeling pain beyond all comprehension. He isn’t the one who is upside down, it’s the man waiting with unswerving loyalty, on the banks created by the river of death. The book he is writing talks of pain, of pain, pain, pain, where does it go? Where does it come from? Is he the one writing his own book?

He opens the outer door of his house, and there stands a man without a nose, and then the man without a nose is lying dead in front of him. He sees an extremely pale man in uniform. The extremely pale man in uniform is holding a thin metal wire in his hand. Beside the pale man is another, darker man. He has a purple birthmark on his neck. In the shape of a rhombus. Behind both men, bathed in a strange, artificial light, he sees a third man, and the third man also has a thin metal wire in his hand, and he should see him, but he doesn’t. On his wrist, the numbers are on their way away. The man without a nose says ‘Sheinkman’, and he is standing completely still and watching him, and the man without a nose says ‘Sheinkman’ once more, and this time he points to himself and cracks into an enormous smile which covers his entire face, and then he comes up out of the river and sees that the metro station is Sandsborg.

He was close now. The day’s route is clear to him. A ‘U’. Today, he travelled in the shape of a ‘U’. The last letter. How did he travel yesterday? He would have to go in and travel through the previous day again. Slowly, it became a symbol. A letter.

As the train left the station, he realised that it was no longer moving through tunnels. It was out in the daylight. Though it was night now, so there wasn’t much light. They were heading towards the night, he thought, feeling the presence with great clarity. Death was sitting beside him, travelling with him, and it was an entirely ordinary person.

But then it broke up – death’s outline broke up. Why? Can’t he die now either? Or wasn’t it death pursuing him? Was it some other being?

Everything was impenetrable again.

A muddle. Arms, a man without a nose, three men with a light behind them, numbers on the move, a thin metal wire, an upside-down face, a book being written in, legs, thin, thin legs, a stench beyond all comprehension.

Yesterday’s letter was a ‘V’. As the train came to a halt at Skogskyrkogården station and he stepped onto the platform with shaking, unsteady legs, that much was utterly clear to him. It was obvious. He has been following an internal map.

Dusk fell slowly around him. Leaning on his stick for support, he crossed the street and tottered into the cemetery area. The street lights illuminated his path like beacons, and here and there, candles were burning on graves. There was less and less town here, more and more forest. Only the rows of gravestones separated the place from the woods. Beneath his feet, the dead were travelling. The trees, the bushes, the plants: all took their nourishment from the rotting bodies. For a moment, he imagined that the vegetation seemed different to elsewhere.

As though plants nourished on bodies took on a different shape.

He tottered on through the evening. The scent of newly bloomed spring mixed with the stench of the past. There was an air of putrefaction hanging over the cemetery. Christian graves had always made him uneasy – finally, he was starting to understand why.

The strangely shaped trees were completely motionless. There wasn’t a single breath of air. Still, he felt some kind of presence which was no longer the comforting presence of death. The safety of death had left him now. The presence was utterly tangible but still only vague, like a mirage. Things that seemed to be moving at the edge of his field of vision.

He wouldn’t let terror take hold of him. He couldn’t get bogged down in the mire of fear. He dragged himself up, above the surface. Mental gymnastics. For five days now, he had been travelling. His journey was still missing a letter. The middle letter. The journey from the day before yesterday. He recalled it as he shuffled on through the big cemetery. An animal made itself heard. An owl, hooting.

He remembered that he got off the metro and made a pointless little trip on the bus in the far north of the city. That it was in the shape of a ring – or a dot.

The dot above an i.

The third letter was an ‘i’. That meant that all of the letters, aside from the opening ‘E’, were small. Lower case.

Without realising it, he had left the Christian graves behind. He had reached Bet Hachajim, the Jewish congregation’s area of the cemetery. Södra Begravningsplatsen. There were small stones on some of the graves. At the top of the headstones, two Hebrew letters: ‘Here lies’. At the bottom, five Hebrew letters meaning: ‘May his/her soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.’ It felt like home. And yet it didn’t at all.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow move behind a tree. Then another.

He stood still. The owl hooted again. It was the sound of death, completely logical. He stood there, putting his five days’ journeys in order. Five letters, each taking its place behind the preceding one like playing cards. First ‘E’ and then ‘p’, then ‘i’ and ‘v’, and finally ‘u’. ‘Epivu’.

Utterly meaningless. How tragic, dying with yet another unsolvable riddle on his lips. He laughed silently. Gallows humour.

But then the incredible happened: the pictures started to arrange themselves in order, like playing cards, in perfectly clear order.

He started moving again. Not much movement. He tottered, half hanging from his cane. All around him, nature seemed to be enveloped in shifting shadows, the trees seemed to be moving, a forest drawing closer, and he grabbed the first playing card and glanced at it.

His entire life changed character.

Then, through the darkness, he saw that several of the gravestones were lying flat on the ground. One of them was completely broken. Of course it was that one. The one he has always been heading towards. He laughed. He heard his own laugh and it echoed emptily. Incredibly emptily.

It was entirely logical that only that particular gravestone should be the one which had been broken. He knelt down next to it and peered up. In the distance, he could make out a couple of figures. They were shouting, throwing bottles and breaking another one of the gravestones over there; their heads were shaven. He snorted, touching the broken gravestone. It was a disappointment. Was that really his fate? Skinhead neo-Nazis? So… banal.

He glanced through the internal images, so well ordered by this point. This was probably just the clarity that came right before death. Life reviewing itself.

So, he thought. It was utterly, utterly clear. Of course. That was it.

Naturally, it wasn’t something with which you could live.

And just like that, he also understood the letters. ‘Epivu’. Of course.

It was simply a matter of changing your perspective.

That wasn’t a dot above the ‘i’.

And the skinheads weren’t his fate. It felt good. More just.

‘You’ve been hunting a long time,’ he said aloud, though he didn’t know which language he had used.

‘Yes,’ a woman’s voice replied. ‘Quite a while.’

He felt himself being hoisted up. It was pitch black. Ancient darkness. The ice-cold wind was whistling. His body was spinning. Everything was upside down. He saw the moon peering through between his feet. He saw the stars burst out into blinding song. And he saw the darkness darkening.

Then he saw a face. It was upside down. The man who had been waiting with unswerving loyalty for more than fifty years was a woman, and she was now leading him onto the ferry which would take him over the river of death which has finally, finally poured from within him. He was the one who was upside down.

Then came the pain.

A half-century late.

And it was exactly as he imagined it would be.