Daniel

Chapter 1

He had walked a long way in the intense heat. Several times in the last twenty-four hours he had been struck by vertigo and thought that he was about to die. It had filled him with fear, or perhaps it was actually rage, and he had struggled on in a fury. The desert was endless. He didn’t want to die here, not yet, and he had urged on Amos, fat Neka and the other black men he had hired in Cape Town who were driving his three oxen and the wagon in which his entire life was packed and tied with ropes. Somewhere ahead of them, deep inside the blinding heat, there was a trading post, and if he reached it everything would be all right again. He would not die. He would continue to search for his insects, to look for a damned fly that no one had ever seen before, which he would name after himself, Musca bengleriensis. He couldn’t give up now. He had invested everything in this hunt for an unknown fly. So he struggled onward, and the sand and the sun sliced through his mind like knives.

Two years earlier he had been sitting in his student room on Prästgatan in Lund and listening to the sound of horses’ hooves clattering on the cobblestones outside, as he studied an incomplete German map of the Kalahari Desert. He traced his finger along the coastline of German South-West Africa, north to the border of Angola, south to the land of the Boers, and then inland, towards the centre of southern Africa, which had no name. He was twenty-seven years old then, in 1874, and he had already given up all hope of completing his university studies and passing his exams. When he first came to Lund from the Cathedral School in Växjö he had thought of becoming a physician, but he fainted and fell like a heavy tree on his first visit to the Anatomy Theatre. The lecturer, Professor Enander, had clearly explained before the doors were opened that they were going to dissect a homeless, unmarried woman who had drunk herself to death at a brothel in Copenhagen and been transported back to Sweden in a pine box. She was a Mamsell Andersson from Kivik, who had fallen into the sinful life and delivered an illegitimate child at the age of fifteen. She had sought happiness in Copenhagen, where there was nothing to be found but misfortune. He could still hear the almost salacious contempt dripping from Professor Enander’s introductory words.

‘We shall be cutting up a cadaver that was already a cadaver even in life. A whore’s cadaver from Österlen.’

Then they had entered the Anatomy Theatre en masse, seven medical students, all men, all equally pale, and Professor Enander had begun to slice open her abdomen. That’s when he fainted. He struck his head on one of the hard steel edges of the dissection table; he still had the scar, just above his right eye.

After that he had abandoned all thought of a medical career. He considered joining the army but could envision nothing but a meaningless ritual of marching and screaming young men. He had dabbled in philosophy, and thought about becoming a pastor when he sat drinking with his friends, but there was no God, and finally he wound up among the insects.

He could still recall that morning in early summer. He woke with a start, as if something had bitten him, and when he threw open the window the stench from the street below made him sick. As if aware of sudden danger he quickly threw on his clothes, grabbed his walking stick, and strode out of town to the south, towards Staffanstorp. Somewhere along the road he grew weary and stepped into the bushes to rest and perhaps masturbate in the shade of a tree. And as he lay there a gaudy-coloured butterfly settled on his hand. It was a brimstone butterfly, but it was something else as well. The play of colours kept shifting on its wings as they slowly opened and closed. The rays of sunshine falling through the foliage transformed the yellow to red, to blue, and back to yellow. The butterfly sat on his hand for a long time, as if it had an important message for him, and then, as it suddenly took flight and vanished, he knew.

Insects.

The world was full of insects which didn’t have names and had not been catalogued. Insects that were waiting for him. Waiting to be sorted, described and classified. He had returned to Lund, sought admission to the Botany Department, and although he was already a senior student the professor was kind and accepted him. During the summer he visited his home in Småland, where his father lived as a man of independent means on the family estate outside Hovmantorp. His mother had died when he was fifteen; his two sisters were older, and since they were both married and lived abroad, in Berlin and Verona, only his father was there, with the old housekeeper. The house was decaying, just as his father was slowly rotting away. He had contracted syphilis in his youth when he was in Paris, and now he sat imprisoned inside an arbour in the summer, alone in his chair. The arbour was pruned so that one had to crawl inside through a hole quite close to the ground. In the autumn his father locked himself in his bedchamber and stayed there through the whole six months of winter, motionless, staring at the ceiling and grinding his teeth until the warmth of spring returned.

Bengler’s grandfather had been fortunate in his business speculations during the Napoleonic Wars, and there was still some capital left, although it was much diminished. The estate was mortgaged to the rooftops, and every time he visited his childhood home he realised that this was all the inheritance he could expect. Nothing but the monthly allowances that made it possible for him to survive in Lund.

His father was a shadow and had never been anything else. And yet Bengler visited him in in Hovmantorp that summer to obtain his blessing. He had a vague hope that his father would be able to give him a little financial support for the expedition he was planning.

In addition, and this was the most important thing, he knew that it was time to say goodbye. His father would soon be gone.

From Växjö he got a lift from a travelling salesman who was going to Lessebo. The wagon was uncomfortable, the road was bad, and there was a strong smell of mould from the salesman’s coat. He was indeed wearing a fur coat even though it was early June — not full summer heat yet, but already warm.

‘Hovmantorp,’ he said after an hour had passed. ‘A fine-sounding name. But there’s nothing there.’

Then they introduced themselves. That never would have happened when they met the night before, as he went round the inns in the little town looking for a ride.

‘Hans Bengler.’

The travelling salesman pondered for several kilometres before he replied.

‘That doesn’t sound Swedish,’ he said. ‘But what is Swedish anyway, other than endless roads through equally endless forests? My name isn’t Swedish either. It’s Puttmansson, Natanael Puttmansson, and belongs to the chosen yet exiled people. I sell brushes and household remedies for barrenness and gout.’

‘There’s some Walloon in my lineage,’ replied Hans Bengler. ‘A bit of French. There’s a Huguenot in the family too, and a Finn. And a French cavalry captain who served under Napoleon and took a shot through the forehead at Austerlitz. But my name is genuine.’

They rattled on further. A lake glittered among the trees. He’s certainly not talkative, Bengler thought. Big forests either make people silent or make them talk incessantly. I’m thankful that this salesman who smells like mould is a man who keeps his mouth shut.

Then the horse died.

It stopped in its tracks, tried to rear up as though it had suddenly encountered an invisible enemy, and then collapsed. The salesman didn’t seem surprised.

‘Swindled,’ he said simply. ‘Someone sells me a horse under false pretences, and the only thing I’ve never learned to judge is horses.’

They parted ways without much ado. Bengler took his knapsack and walked the last ten kilometres to Hovmantorp. Since he was a man devoted to insects, he stopped now and then to study various creeping things, preparing himself to see his father. Just before he reached Hovmantorp it started to rain. He crept into a barn and masturbated for a while as he thought about Matilda, who was his whore and worked in a brothel just north of the cathedral. It was several hours before the rainstorm passed. He sat looking at the dark sky while his member dried off, thinking that the clouds looked like a caravan, and he wondered how it would be to live in a desert where rain almost never fell.

Why had he decided on the desert, anyway?

He didn’t know. When he was studying the maps his first thought was of South America. But the mountain ranges frightened him, since he didn’t like being up high. He had never even dared climb the tower of the cathedral to look out over the fields. It made him dizzy just thinking of it. The choice came down to the great steppes in the realm of the Mongolians, the deserts of Arabia or the white spot in south-west Africa. His final decision had something to do with German. He spoke German since he had hiked the country with a friend several years earlier. They had made it all the way down to the Tyrol. Then his travelling companion suddenly contracted a fever and died after violent attacks of vomiting, and Bengler hurriedly returned home. But he had learned German.

As he sat there in the barn with his member in his hand, he thought that he was actually an apprentice, sent out into the world by the dead master Linnaeus. But he also worried that he was not at all suited to the task. He had a low tolerance for pain, he wasn’t particularly strong and he was scared of loud noises. Yet one thing could be counted as an asset for him, and that was his stubbornness. And behind his stubbornness lay vanity. Somewhere he would be able to discover a butterfly, or maybe a fly, that was not listed in the catalogues of entomology, and then he could name it after himself.

He went home. His father was sitting in the arbour soaking wet when he crept through the hedge. His father’s jaws were grinding, he was crumbling away. He was bald, his skin hung loose and he did not recognise his son. It was a living death sitting there in the arbour, his jaws grinding like millstones with no grain, his whole skeleton creaking, his heart heaving like bellows, and Bengler felt that this pilgrimage to his childhood home was like stepping into a nightmare. But he still sat there for a while and chatted with his deranged father. Then he went up to the house, where the housekeeper was pleased to see him, but no more than that. She made up a bed for him in his old room and gave him something to eat. While she was clattering around in the kitchen he walked round the house and picked up any silver he found. He was taking his inheritance in advance, realising that he would be arriving in the African desert as a quite indigent entomologist.

During the night he lay awake. The housekeeper usually brought in his father at sundown and put him to bed on a sofa downstairs. Sometime in the night he went down there and sat in the shadows looking at his father. He was asleep, but his jaws kept on grinding. Something suddenly made Bengler upset, a sorrow that surprised him, and he went over and stroked his father’s bald head In that instant, with that touch, he said his farewell. He felt as if he were standing and watching a coffin being lowered into the earth.

Afterwards he lay awake and waited for daybreak. There was no substance to this waiting, no impatience, no dreams, as though his insides were a flat, cold slab of stone.

He left before the housekeeper awoke.

Three days later he returned to Lund. During his first week back he travelled across the Sound and sold the silver in Copenhagen. Just as he had suspected, he didn’t get much money for what he had to offer. The only thing that brought a good price was a snuffbox which had belonged to the ancestor who had his brains blown out at Austerlitz.

By the following year he had learned everything he now knew about insects. The professor had been friendly, and when he asked why a perpetual student had suddenly been gripped by a fascination for the tiniest creatures, Bengler replied that he actually didn’t know. He had studied colour plates and examined the insects preserved in alcohol, floating weightless in the glass jars that stood on mute shelves in the halls of the Biological Institute. He had learned to distinguish and identify, had plucked off wings and dissected. At the same time he had tried to learn about deserts, about the African continent, which was still largely terra incognita. But in Lund there had been no professors who knew anything about deserts, or barely anything about Africa. He read everything he came across, and went over to Copenhagen a few times to seek out seamen in Nyhavn who had travelled to Cape Town or Dakar and who could tell him about Africa.

He had told no one but Matilda about his plans. She came to him every Thursday between four and six in the afternoon. Besides having sex, always in the missionary position, she also washed his shirts, and afterwards they would drink port and talk. Matilda was nineteen years old and had left her home in Landskrona when her father tried to rape and then set fire to her. For a brief period she had been a maid before she threw away the apron and the subservience and headed for the brothel. She was flat-chested but very nice, and he made no other demands on eroticism but that it should be nice, not troublesome or ecstatic. He told her about the journey on which he would be embarking the next year, early in the spring, when he understood it was not yet too warm in southern Africa. She listened, uninterested beyond the fact that now she would have to look for another steady customer.

Once he had suggested that she come with him.

‘I refuse to travel by sea,’ she replied vehemently. ‘You can die there, sink to the bottom and never come up.’

And nothing more was said about it.

Winter that year was very mild in Skåne. In early May he moved out of the apartment on Prästgatan. He told his few friends that he was going to take a short trip through Europe and would be back soon.

A fishing boat took him to Copenhagen. For three weeks he lived in a cheap boarding house with sailors in Nyhavn. One Sunday he went to watch a beheading. He didn’t go to the theatre or visit the museums. He talked to the sailors and waited. He had reduced his baggage to a minimum; everything was contained in a simple chest he had found in the attic of the building on Prästgatan. He had packed up his maps, colour plates and books, some shirts, a pair of extra trousers, leather boots. In Copenhagen he had bought a revolver and ammunition. That was all. He changed the money he had left into gold. He carried it in a leather pouch inside his shirt.

He also had his hair cut very short and started to grow a beard. And he waited.

On 23 May he found out that an English schooner, the Fox, would be sailing from Helsingør to Cardiff and then on to Cape Town. The same day he left his boarding house and took the post coach north to Helsingør. He paid a visit to the captain of the black-painted schooner and obtained a promise to be accepted on board as a passenger, although there would be no private cabin at his disposal. For the passage he paid about half the contents of his leather pouch.

On the evening of 25 May the Fox left Helsingør. He stood by the railing and sensed everything making headway within him. Inside his breastbone he had masts that were raising their sails. Something was pulling at him, as if a line had been lashed around his heart. He was seized by a desire to be a child again, just for a moment. To skip, babble, crawl, learn to walk right there on the scoured deck.

That night he slept heavily.

By dawn the next morning they had already passed Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark and were in another world.

That world was covered by a thick and immovable fog.

Chapter 2

On the ship he was liberated from his name. He was never called anything but ‘the Passenger’. Without knowing how it happened, he underwent a ritual in which he was stripped of his former identity and became the Passenger. Among these pale but hard-working men he was the only one who did nothing but travel. Without a name, without a past, with nothing more than a bunk in the crew’s quarters. And that was fine with him. When he lost his identity, the past disappeared. It was as though the salt water that splashed up over the railing penetrated his consciousness and corroded all the shadowy memories he carried. The sound of his father’s grinding jaws ebbed away, Matilda became an indistinct silhouette and the house in Hovmantorp a ruin. Of his mother and two sisters nothing was left, not even the memory of their voices. When he was transformed into the Passenger he discovered for the first time that something existed which he had heard of but never before comprehended: freedom.

He would always remember the arrival in Cape Town as an extended and surreal dream. Or perhaps it was actually the end of one nightmare that imperceptibly slipped over into another? Even before they reached Cardiff, the captain, whose name was Robertson, had turned out to suffer from recurrent bouts of madness. He would come rushing into the crew’s quarters with knives in his hands, slashing wildly in all directions. They had to tie him down; only when he began weeping some days later would they release him again. Bengler understood that the crew had great love for the captain. The schooner was actually a floating cathedral with a number of acolytes who were prepared to follow their master into death. Between his attacks, Robertson was very amiable and devoted both interest and time to his lone, taciturn passenger. He was in his forties and had gone to sea when he was nine. At sixteen he underwent a religious crisis, and then, when he became captain, shouldered an invisible mantle which was actually a pastor’s robe and not a marine uniform. He told his passenger about many oddities from the African continent. But he had never visited the desert. He assumed an absent, almost sorrowful expression when the Passenger told him about his plans. He didn’t reveal his deepest secret, about the mysterious butterfly or fly he would name after himself. But he did talk about the insects, how he was going to catalogue, sort, identify and carry out the arrangements that were necessary for a person to be able to live a decent life.

The talk about the desert, the expanses of sand, made Robertson depressed.

‘You can’t even drown in sand,’ said Robertson.

‘But you can be covered up by it,’ replied the Passenger.

Robertson observed him for a long time before he made another comment.

‘No one has ever seen a god arise from a grain of sand. On the other hand, the Devil has been known to spew burning sand from his maw.’

The Passenger didn’t mention the sand again. Instead he enticed Robertson to tell him about the black people, the very short and the very tall, about the women who smeared dung in their hair, the violent dances that were nothing more than shadow images of erotic games. And the Passenger listened. Every evening, except during a heavy storm in the Bay of Biscay, he noted down what the captain had said. After he helped Robertson clean out a severely infected ear, their relationship had deepened. As a special favour, as if he were being allowed to take part in a holy sacrament, Robertson had taught him to use the sextant. The feeling that he was carrying the ship inside him rather than standing on its deck became ever stronger. Each morning he raised his inner sails, depending on the direction and force of the winds. In the evenings, or when a storm was brewing, he watched the crew clambering up the rigging and took the same measures inside himself.

On 22 June just at sundown, the lookout shouted, ‘Land, ho!’ Robertson let the vessel lie at drift-anchor that night. In the crew’s quarters a strange silence prevailed, as if none of them dared believe that they had survived yet another journey to the distant dark continent. In low voices, as if they were confiding secrets to one another, they began to plan for the days they would spend ashore. He listened attentively to the whispers passing through the cabin. It was like a chant in which two things were murmured time after time: women and beer, women and beer. Nothing more. The last night on the ship he tried to reconcile his thoughts with all that he had left behind, but he could not even recall Matilda’s face. There was nothing.

At dawn he took leave of Robertson.

‘We’ll never see each other again,’ said Robertson. ‘I can always tell when I’m saying goodbye to someone for the last time.’

It was as though Robertson were issuing his death warrant. It upset him because it made him fearful. Could Robertson see what lay before him, see into the unknown? He refused to believe that this was true, but Robertson was one of the most mysterious men he had ever met. What was he really? A mad preacher or a mad sea captain? Or a man who actually had the ability to discern the men for whom death was already waiting?

‘Good luck,’ said Robertson, stretching out his hand. ‘Everyone has his path to follow. And that cannot be altered.’

Then he was rowed ashore. Tafelberg loomed high like a decapitated neck over the city that lay wedged at the foot of the mountain. On the quay there was great confusion; people yelled and shoved, some black men with rings in their ears began to tear at his chest and he was forced to defend himself with his fists. He spoke German, but nobody understood him; all around him English was being spoken. Robertson had given him two addresses, one for a boarding house which was usually free of lice, and one for an old English pilot who for some reason was the honorary consul for the Union of Sweden and Norway in Cape Town. When, after numerous difficulties, he found his way to the boarding house, he was drenched with sweat. The white woman who owned the establishment yelled at a fat mulatto and told her to give the new guest some water. He drank it, knowing that something was going to happen to his stomach. He was shown to a room where the sheet was ironed yet still wet. Everything seemed damp, the floorboards had pores, and he lay down on the bed and thought: Now I’m here and I have absolutely no idea where I am.

The next day, after he had succumbed to the first bout of diarrhoea, he looked up the Swedish-Norwegian honorary consul. This gentleman lived in a white house next to a road that climbed towards the mountains. He was admitted to the house by a black man with no teeth, and he sat waiting for two hours on a wooden chair until Consul Wackman had finished snoring and got up and dressed. Wackman was completely bald, had no eyebrows, and his protruding ears reminded Bengler of swallows’ wings. His legs were short, his stomach held up by a piece of Indian fabric, and on his bare chest sat two bloodsucking leeches. He glanced over the letter that Robertson had written and then tossed it aside.

‘All these Swedish madmen. Why do they always have to come here? What we need are engineers. Competent people who can solve practical problems, or have raw strength, or a little capital. But not all these madmen who either want to import revival or collect the dung that the elephants leave behind. And now this. Insects. Who needs flies and mosquitoes in catalogues?’

With his fat fingers he grabbed a small silver bell and rang it. A black servant, naked except for a thin loincloth, came in and knelt down.

‘What would you like to drink?’ Wackman asked. ‘Gin or not gin?’

‘Gin.’

The black man disappeared from the room. Outside the window Bengler could see that someone had hung up a vulture by its feet and was beating it with a wooden stick.

They drank.

‘I had thought about making a living from ostriches,’ said the Passenger, who was now slowly feeling his name returning. He was again on his way to becoming Hans Bengler from Hovmantorp.

Wackman regarded him for a long time before he replied.

‘So, you’re a madman,’ he said at last. ‘You think you’re going to hunt ostriches and export feathers for ladies’ hats. It won’t pay. The feathers will rot before the ship has even left the harbour.’

With that, all discussion was over. Wackman did, however, exhibit a certain resigned kindness and promised to help him acquire some oxen, a wagon, and hire some ox-drivers. Then he would have to manage on his own. Wackman thought it would be advisable if he left a will with him, in case there was something to be inherited. Or at least the address of a family member who could be informed that his relative’s bones were now resting in an unknown location in an endless desert.

They kept on drinking gin. He thought about the mellow port wine he had drunk with Matilda. That world now seemed like an enigmatic mirage. Now it was raw gin tearing at his throat. And Wackman, breathless, as if he would give up the ghost at any time, told him the strange story of how he, who was born in Glasgow, had wound up in Cape Town and came to be the owner of a brothel and represent the Swedish-Norwegian Union.

The story was about bears and a lithograph that he had once seen in his younger days in the window of a bookseller’s in Glasgow. Bear Hunting in Swedish Wermland. He had never been able to forget that image. In his twenties he had made his pilgrimage, arriving in Karlstad in the middle of a terrible winter. Several times he had almost died from the terror that the cold aroused in him, not the cold itself. He never saw a live bear, even though he stayed in that awful cold for more than two months. On the other hand, he did see a bear skin at the home of a retired artillery captain who lived by the square. Then he had left Sweden as fast as he could, and by a circuitous route ended up in Cape Town, where he wanted to show his gratitude for seeing the bear skin by taking on the task of serving as the consul of the Swedish-Norwegian Union.

By late afternoon they were both fairly well intoxicated. Wackman ordered his carriage and together they rolled down the steep road and stopped outside the low cement building that housed his brothel. Half-naked black women melted into the darkness in the low rooms and there was a strong smell of unknown spices. Wackman vanished and Bengler suddenly discovered that he was entwined with black snakes: female arms, legs, feet, bellies, and he fled into the gin fog and didn’t know whether it was actually Robertson’s schooner that slowly sank towards the bottom of the sea, or the ship he carried inside himself.

The next day he awoke on the floor of a room with a veil beside his head. When he forced himself to stand up he discovered a blue spider which was busy weaving its web in the corner between two walls. He reminded himself of his mission and walked through the brothel, where everyone now seemed to be asleep, and found Wackman passed out in an antique rocking chair. Although Wackman was sleeping deeply, he seemed to have been waiting for him. When Bengler stood behind him he awoke with a start.

‘I need nine days,’ Wackman said. ‘And all the cash or all the gold dust you have in that pouch that’s bulging under your shirt, which by the way is filthy and should be washed. Nine days, no more. Then you can be on your way. And I will never see you again. But there is one piece of advice I would give you. Advice about the future.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The pianoforte.’

‘The pianoforte?’

‘It’s all the rage in England. It will spread over the entire continent. Those young mamselles play the piano. Black and white keys. Those pianos need keys. And the keys need ivory.’

Bengler understood. Wackman thought that he ought to go in for elephant hunting.

‘I came here for the tiny creatures,’ he replied. ‘Not the big ones.’

‘Blame yourself and die,’ said Wackman. ‘No one will miss you, no one will remember you.’

But Wackman, whose first name was Erasmus, kept his promise. On the ninth day everything was ready. For lack of anything better, Bengler had left Wackman the address of the housekeeper in Hovmantorp. In the event that he died, she would stuff the letter between his father’s grinding jaws and the last memory of him would be eradicated.

And yet he knew this would not happen. Without being able to explain it, not to mention defend it, he was convinced he would survive.

The sand would not sneak up on him.

On one of the first days in July he set off from Cape Town.

The sluggish oxen moved very slowly. He had purchased a tropical helmet and hung a rifle over his shoulder. Insects buzzed around his face, lured by his sweat. He thought that they would lead him in the right direction. They were his most important travelling companions.

The compass, which had been made in London and was encased in brass, showed that his course was due north, perhaps with a deviation of a few hundredths of a degree to the west.

The first night he changed his clothes before he sat down to eat the dinner served by Amos, his cook. They had made camp by the bank of a small river. The starry sky was clear and close. Suddenly he saw the Big Dipper. It hung upside down. As a last farewell to everything he had left behind, he surprised his ox-drivers by standing on his head and looking at the Big Dipper as he had seen it as a child.

They thought he was praying to a god.

For a long time he lay awake and waited for a beast of prey to roar in the night.

But everything was very quiet.

Chapter 3

The next day, during the hottest hour of the day when the sun hung straight over his head, the fear came.

At first it was a creeping anxiety. A premonition which he initially dismissed by thinking it was something he had eaten. Or that he had forgotten something, a thought that glided past unnoticed, and he didn’t realise was important. This uneasiness or anxiety was light. The fear came later. It was heavy and pulled at him like a powerful magnet.

They had stopped at the edge of some flat country where low bushes lay blanched in the sun. Neka had set up a parasol and placed his folding chair on a little rug. They had eaten rice, vegetables and a strong spicy bread which according to Wackman was the only kind that did not get mouldy during long expeditions. Amos, Neka and the other two ox-drivers, whose names he hadn’t yet learned, lay sleeping under the wagon. The three oxen stood motionless. Their skin twitched when insects bit them.

It was in that instant the dry earth was transformed into iron. The magnet pulled and he felt the fear coming. He had just taken out his diary to make notes about the morning’s events. He had decided to write three times a day: when he awoke, after the midday rest and before he went to sleep. Since he could not imagine keeping these notes only for his own sake, he had decided that the person he would direct his words to was Matilda. The fear came just as he had finished his account of the morning. They had struck the tent at sunrise. At nine o’clock they passed a dry riverbed where he had identified the skeleton of a crocodile. He calculated the length as three metres and ten centimetres. Just after ten o’clock they passed an area of dense, thorny thickets that made the oxen restless. Before they stopped for their midday rest, he had seen a large bird hovering motionless above his head, as if resting on an invisible pillar. Whether it was an eagle or a vulture he could not tell. After these practical matters he had added, The feeling is very strong. From Hovmantorp I have come all the way here. I realise that the road is endless and life is very short. That was when the fear came. At first he wondered what was causing it. He no longer had diarrhoea, his pulse was normal, he had no infections. There didn’t seem to be any threats: no beasts of prey, no hostile inhabitants. Everything was actually quite idyllic. Motionless oxen, men sleeping under a wagon.

It’s about me, he thought as he wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. It’s about me sitting here in the midst of an unreal idyll. He suddenly thought he saw Professor Enander before him and heard his words: We shall be cutting up a cadaver that was a cadaver even in life.

He thought about how he had fainted and that it had been his way of fleeing. To escape seeing how the belly would be slit open and the guts spill out. Now he sat in the middle of a strange place in the southern part of Africa, on his way to an unknown goal: a previously unnamed, uncatalogued, and unidentified fly, or perhaps a butterfly.

He could now look his fear right in the face. What he had decided to devote his life to, an expedition from which it was uncertain that he would return alive, was also a kind of flight. The same as when he fainted in the Anatomy Theatre. Now he was in a different kind of theatre. The African landscape, the motionless oxen, the sleeping men under the wagon, it was all a stage set. He was in the middle of a play about his own flight. From Hovmantorp and the grinding jaws, from his failed studies in Lund, his failed life. Nothing more.

He regarded the revolver that he had bought in Copenhagen, which was now loaded and lying at his feet. It would be very simple to take his own life, he thought. A few simple hand movements, a boom that I would never even hear. Probably the ox-drivers would bury me on the spot, divide up my belongings and vanish to the four winds. They might get into a fight over the oxen, since there are four of them and only three oxen. By then they would already have forgotten that I ever existed. And I would never learn how their names — the two whose names seem to consist only of consonants — are actually pronounced.

He got up and left the shade of the parasol. One of the oxen looked at him. The heat was very strong. He stood underneath a knotty tree, the only one at their resting place. I’m afraid because I don’t know who I am, he thought. Whether all this has been a flight from the thoroughly meaningless life of a student or not, it has certainly been a flight from myself. I have sat drinking for nights on end and denied God’s existence, but it was nothing more than drunken babble. I believe in a god, a god of wrath and judgement, who is everywhere. I was ashamed when I sat and masturbated in the ditches by the fields of Skåne. I knew that someone was watching me when Matilda sucked on me. I have pretended to be liberal, professed myself an adherent of the new world that the engineers and steam power will create. I was full of contempt when Pastor Cavallius in Hovmantorp claimed that railways were an invention of the Devil. I pretended to believe in the future, feigned a resistance to everything obsolete, when actually I am afraid of everything I can’t predict. I am the least-suited person to be standing under this tree in Africa, as the leader of an expedition, on the hunt for an unknown insect. Wackman was absolutely right, of course. He saw straight through me, saw the madman behind the false earnestness.

He went back to the parasol. The fear sat like a knot in his stomach. He folded his hands and said a prayer. I am looking for a truth that does not have to be big. Just so long as it exists. Amen.

Neka, who was fat and shapeless, had woken up. He stood by the tree pissing, then he returned to the wagon and went back to sleep.

Bengler began to think about the English scientist and his theses that they had discussed during late nights at the Småland students’ club. The man had travelled around the world with one of the British Admiralty’s vessels and then returned to England and claimed that human beings were apes. Bengler had seldom said anything during the heated discussions. To a man, the theologians had stood on the side of God, and they had loosed volleys of Scripture against the attacking hordes of freethinkers. And the freethinkers had picked up Darwin’s instruments and slit open the theologians’ arguments with tiny scalpels. He had mostly sat on the sidelines and listened. Now he thought that the fear had probably already been present back then. The fear that God would cease to exist. Whether his grandmother was an ape was not so important.

He could see everything very clearly now. The fear was like a spyglass that he could use to look backwards. And what he saw was nothing. A person from the interior of Småland who didn’t believe in anything, who didn’t really want anything, who in a manifestation of the utmost vanity was looking for a fly that he could name after himself.

At the same time he thought there might be a solution in this. He could use the expedition to try to find a meaning to his own life. He could choose whether there was a god or whether it was the engineers who shaped the world. Was God in a heaven or was He in the iron beams that held together the new factories, the new world? The path that led to the desert and then the desert without paths would give him the time he needed to find an answer.

Slowly he felt the fear receding. He closed his eyes. The sun continued to burn inside his eyelids.

They set off in the afternoon. He took turns walking in front, next to the wagon, or at the rear. The magnet had released its grip. He felt exhilarated.

They reached a swamp that they would have to go round to reach the low mountains beyond. According to the map, the mountains formed the extreme boundary of the desert which would then come slowly sneaking towards them. Then one of the wagon wheels broke. The wagon slumped over on its side, the oxen stopped, and he went to assess the damage. Behind him the ox-drivers stood silent. He tried to decide whether it would be possible to fix the wheel, but several of the rough spokes had broken off. They would have to use the spare wheel that Wackman had insisted he take with him, even though it was heavy and the wagon already overloaded. He explained to Amos, who he thought be might the leader of the others, by gesturing with his hands and arms that the wheel had to be changed. Then he called for his folding chair and parasol and sat down to watch the ox-drivers work.

The fear had been fierce. But the contempt that now consumed him was blazing. He watched the ox-drivers’ clumsy attempts to brace the wagon, take off the broken wheel and replace it with a new one. Even though he had never used his hands for practical work he could still see how it should be done. After half an hour he was so upset at their clumsiness and slowness that he leapt up from the folding chair and began ordering them about. I’ve become a military man after all, he thought indignantly. And it’s when some damned good-for-nothings can’t manage to change a wheel. After he took charge he noticed that his agitation seemed to increase. He began to shout and point and push aside anyone who made a mistake. It surprised him that none of the men protested, or even showed the slightest sign of irritation at this treatment, and this increased his vexation. When the new wheel was in place he demanded that they pick up speed so that they could make up for lost time. But what time was actually lost? he thought. What path can’t we reclaim tomorrow? What stretch of road do we have to put behind us today? This expedition has no goal.

And yet he forced the pace. His rage had now completely replaced his fear. For the first time in his life he felt himself to be the stronger one.

Just before sunset they pitched camp for the night. On the way he had shot an animal that looked like a hare. He lay down on his camp bed in the tent and smelled the aroma from the meat and the fire. I have instilled respect in these people, he thought. From now on there will be no doubt that I will make the decisions that are required. I’m still young, but these ox-drivers have understood that I have the power necessary to make the crucial decisions.

He ate the roasted meat. The ox-drivers kept their distance, by the fire. In the books he had read the previous winter, he had learned of some new theories, French and German, that seemed to coincide as if by chance. The noble savage did not exist. He belonged to the romantic world view of former eras, the time before the engineers, the iron beams and the account ledgers. He had read these theories which took a scientific view of skin colour and brains, noses and feet. He had read about subhumans and superhumans. At first he had thought that they could not be true, because all men had been created equal. But if there was no God, there didn’t have to be equality either. Now he thought he had managed to confirm this with his own eyes. The ox-drivers were another sort of human being. They had to be driven the same way that they drove the oxen. Even though he was only descended from a man with grinding jaws in Hovmantorp, in the depths of the poor, backward province of Småland, he was still the one who had to make the important decisions for these black people.

Just before he fell asleep, after placing the revolver under his pillow and the rifle on the ground next to his camp bed, he made his last notes of the evening. Once again he addressed himself to Matilda. These people, unfathomably dark in skin colour, cannot be compared to us. They belong to something else; perhaps they are more like animals. But they remind me of the paupers in Sweden. Their submissiveness, silence, ingratiating attitude. Today I discovered the role I have to play in this drama. I am confirming my own freedom. The desert is still far off. Now, just before ten o’clock at night, it is still very warm. I have already noticed that I’m waking up more easily in this heat and that my dreams are different.

Then he blew out the candle.

He didn’t write anything about his fear.

He woke in the middle of the night, jolted out of a dream. His father’s grinding jaws had been very close to him, like the jaws of a beast of prey. In the background he had glimpsed Matilda. She was naked, screaming that she was being raped by a group of soldiers with blue stripes glued to their naked bodies. She had seen him and called to him, begging him to help. But he hid, made himself invisible, and left her to her fate.

And yet it was not the dream that had woken him. When he opened his eyes in the dark he realised that he had been pulled out of sleep by something outside himself. He lay quite still and held his breath. The sweat was sticky on his body. It’s the oxen, he thought. At once he was wide awake. He was not in Lund now, nor Hovmantorp. Africa was a continent where snakes coiled and big cats came sneaking out of the darkness and bit animals’ throats. He fumbled for his rifle. When he felt the cold barrel he grew calmer. He listened in a different way. But he hadn’t been imagining things; the oxen were restless. He lit his lamp, pulled on his trousers and grabbed the rifle. The fire was blazing. He glimpsed the oxen in the shadows just outside the light of the flames. The ox-drivers lay curled up around the fire, but when he counted the bodies he saw that one of them was missing. He checked that the safety was off on his rifle, shook out his boots and pulled them on. Then he walked carefully over to the oxen.

He discovered Neka standing there. Fat, shapeless Neka. He had a whip in his hand. Slowly, as though he were driving the oxen in his sleep, he struck them on their backs. Bengler stopped. What he saw was utterly incomprehensible. One of the ox-drivers, in the middle of the night, naked with his fat belly jiggling, was slowly, as if in a trance, striking the oxen over and over. He thought he ought to intervene, snatch the whip from Neka’s hands, perhaps wake the others sleeping around the fire, and then tie Neka to a tree and have him flogged. Wackman had explained that there were plenty of men, both drivers and bearers, to be found on this strange continent, but good oxen were expensive and uncommon. So oxen had to be weighed against men, oxen protected while men could be discarded. Yet Bengler didn’t move. Neka seemed to be standing there striking the oxen in his sleep. He was staggering as if the blows of the whip were striking him, making his own flesh quiver and not the thick hide of the oxen.

Suddenly it was over. Neka dropped the whip and turned round. Bengler quickly retreated deeper into the darkness. If he were discovered he would have to intervene; punish Neka. But Neka hadn’t seen him. He stumbled back to the fire, curled up and seemed to fall asleep as soon as he closed his eyes.

Bengler went over to the oxen. He stroked his hand along the back of one of them and got blood on his palm. Then he turned and went over to the fire. I could shoot these men, he thought. One by one. That’s how the castes work on this continent. The ones lying here, curled up, unwashed, belong to the lower classes. While I, a failed student from Småland, am a member of the caste comprised of the strongest, those who have power.

He returned to the tent. A lizard sat next to the lamp, staring at an ant slowly approaching. Then its tongue lashed out and the ant was gone.

That night he made another note in his book. He wrote to Matilda: Wish that tonight I had had the courage to flog open the back of one of my ox-drivers with the heavy whip. But I’m not quite at that point yet. If I struck him now it would bother me. Not until I know that the action won’t cause me any pain, only the one who has the skin on his back flayed, will I do it.

He rolled up the diary in the beaver skin that protected it against damp and insects, turned off the lamp and lay down.

I’m searching for an unknown fly, he thought. The way other people search for a god. In the desert I believe I’ll find it. But Wackman with his brothel, his whores and his peculiar ears has no doubt already written to my father’s housekeeper and reported that I failed, that I’m lying in an unmarked grave.

Even though he was very tired he lay awake until dawn.

The next day they continued past the low mountains and in the evening reached the Kalahari Desert.

Chapter 4

From a distance they saw a group of Bushmen pass by.

They were like black dots against the blinding sand. The fact that they were humans and not animals could be surmised from the oxen: the beasts had scented them but decided they were no threat.

They had then been in the desert for two months and four days. It was the first instance in all that time that they had seen any human beings. Before this they had seen only a small herd of zebras and the tracks of snakes that coiled below the crescent-shaped barchans of sand.

Bengler had lost more than nine kilos in weight. Naturally he couldn’t weigh himself, but he knew that it was precisely nine kilos. His trousers flapped around his legs, his chest had sunk, his bearded cheeks were hollow. At night he dreamed that he was slowly being buried in sand. When he tried to scream there was no sound because his vocal cords had dried out.

Somewhere everything had gone wrong. According to the maps Wackman had got for him, they should have passed the chief town of Windhoek in German South-West Africa a week ago. But nothing other than bare mountains, sand and scattered bushes had lain in their illusory path. Twice they had come across waterholes, both times after they had seen swarms of birds rising and falling against the sky. Until now the ox-drivers had not complained, but Bengler realised that it would not be long. Every day the distance between them had increased. On two occasions he had been forced to raise the whip to get them to go on: he knew that the third time it happened he would have to strike.

Neka was still as fat as before. This amazed him. The ox-drivers’ meals were even sparser than his own. But apart from Amos, who knew a few words of English, all conversation was impossible. As soon as he approached they were ready to take orders, perhaps receive a rebuke as he impatiently waved his arms or pointed at some detail that was not as it should be. He had assumed the habit of inspecting the wagon wheels every morning and evening since they could not afford to lose another one. He tried to evaluate the condition of the oxen, whether any were showing signs of illness or exhaustion. He also checked to see that nothing in the wagonload had disappeared. There were his jars and metal containers of alcohol waiting for insects, his drawing materials and provisions. As yet he hadn’t been able to discover if any of the ox-drivers had begun stealing. Each time he made these checks he felt a surge of shame shoot up through his body. What right, really, did he have to mistrust these men, who were the reason that he made progress each day, who pitched his tent and prepared his meals? On several occasions, most often in the evenings, he wrote to Matilda about this. He nearly always used the word caste, as if it had become a sacred term in this connection. The caste who decreed, and those who took orders about what had to be done.

The two months they had been travelling through the desert had altered his entire perception of what the purpose of life actually was. He continued to believe resolutely in his idea that an unknown fly, or perhaps a beetle or butterfly, would provide a reason for his whole existence. Yet at the same time the sand, which was hopelessly incomprehensible, had forced him to look back at his life. The wagon rolled slowly onwards behind the oxen. Within him he was always walking backwards, or inwards, towards something, but he knew not what. Clarity? An understanding of what an individual could or should be? Each morning when they struck camp he selected an idea that he would work on for that day. Since he was poorly trained in philosophy, he had to formulate the big questions in his own mind as best he could.

One day he had pondered love, from the early morning until he fell asleep exhausted that evening. He was thirsty because from the beginning they had had to ration the water. To Matilda he wrote in his book that the grace of love was incomprehensible to him. But that the erotic game she had taught him could still fill him with strong desire.

That day the desert had filled him with hate, because there was nowhere he could go to and masturbate. And by evening, when he was alone in his tent, the desire was gone.

One night he was awakened by a strange silence. At first he didn’t understand what it was. Then he realised that his father’s jaws had stopped grinding. He lit the lamp, looked at his watch and noted the time in his diary. Without knowing it for sure, he was convinced that his father had died. He had been sitting on his chair in the arbour and when the housekeeper crept in to fetch him, his jaws were still and his heart dead. Bengler felt no sorrow, no pain or loss. But he did feel an impatience that was difficult to control. How long would it take before he could get confirmation that it was true? That his father had really stopped grinding his jaws on that very night?

After two weeks in the desert he had caught his first insect. It was Amos who found it. A very small beetle with a greenish-blue shell that was walking slowly through the sand. He identified it in one of the British entomological lexicons that he had brought along. To his astonishment he read that the Bushmen made a lethal poison from the secretion of this beetle. He stuffed it into one of his jars, filled it with alcohol and labelled it. Slowly he had begun to convert his wagon into a museum.

But the journey itself was still what was most important. He had decided that the trading post somewhere ahead of them would serve as the base for his expedition. From there he could organise his hunt for ostriches; from there he could plan, in an entirely different manner, his search for the unknown insect. There would be people he could converse with. He imagined that everything would be there that made a life possible. A hymn book, an old pump organ, ledgers and regular meals. He vaguely hoped that there would also be a woman waiting for him, someone who, like Matilda, might visit him once a week, sit on him and then drink a glass of port.

That had been among the last of his purchases in Cape Town before he said farewell to Wackman: two bottles of Portuguese port.

But the damned maps weren’t right. Or else the constantly drifting sand was a landscape that was impossible to map. In vain he had sought along the horizon for a folded mountain range that was supposed to be there, according to the map. But he hadn’t found it. He wondered whether there was some mysterious disturbance in the sand that made his compass unreliable. Sometimes he was confused at daybreak, thinking that the sun was rising over the horizon at a point where east had not been the day before. Since he had no one to talk to he started talking aloud to himself. So that the ox-drivers wouldn’t think he was losing his mind, he disguised his conversations with himself as religious rituals. He folded his hands, and sometimes he knelt, while out loud he argued with himself about why in hell that mountain range wasn’t where it should be. Why neither the landscape nor the maps were correct. During these sham rituals the ox-drivers would always keep their distance. Occasionally he would also remember to scold them for their laziness, for their unwashed bodies, as he knelt there with folded hands.

The days were uneventful. The sun burned with its blinding light from a cloudless sky. The oxen moved sluggishly, as if the sand were a bog. Now and then the silence was broken by the crack of a whip. The ox-drivers might also break out into incomprehensible songs that could last for hours or end abruptly after only a few minutes.

He wondered what they thought of him. How had Wackman managed to convince them to leave their families and follow him into the desert? What prophecy or payment did they think he would be able to give them? Their wages were poor, the food meagre, the water strictly rationed. And yet they followed him towards a goal that he had not succeeded in pointing out on the map. One day it will come to an end, he wrote to Matilda. People can only put up with so much. When they realise that the journey is meaningless they may turn against me. There are four of them and only one of me. I have decided to shoot Amos first if they turn hostile. He seems to be their leader, the strongest one. I’ll shoot him with the rifle. Then the important thing is not to miss the other three with my revolver. Every morning and evening I check my weapons to make sure no sand has got into the moving parts.

He also wondered whether they could read his thoughts. More and more often the ox-drivers would halt the second before he had planned to raise his hand to give the sign that it was time to stop for their midday rest or to pitch camp for the night. He had written to Matilda about this too. About the invisible language that had been created between himself and the four men who shared his existence.

Sometimes he tried to imagine that she could read what he was writing. Would she understand? Would she be interested at all? He felt a vague fear and a pang of jealousy when the only answer he could give himself was an image: the way she sat with her breasts bare and her dress pulled up, on top of some other, unknown man.

On the twenty-eighth day something happened that would have crucial significance for the man from Hovmantorp. (He had started calling himself that in his mind, a designation of a geographical starting point rather than a meaningless name. He felt that the name Bengler no longer existed. He was Hans Hovmantorp, or simply a man who had once run along the stream that flowed through that little, insignificant village in Småland.)

On precisely this day, the twenty-eighth since their departure from Cape Town, a strong wind had passed through during the morning hours. He had been forced to tie a handkerchief around his face and shade his eyes with his hand to keep out the sand. A little before ten o’clock the wind vanished and the silence returned. He had just taken off the handkerchief when the oxen suddenly came to a halt. Amos, who was guiding the leading ox, had made his whip whistle through the air, but the oxen refused to budge. Even after three or four blows on the lead ox’s back, none of the animals moved. It was as if they had run into an invisible wall or were standing on the edge of a ravine. He saw that the unexpected behaviour of the oxen made the ox-drivers uneasy. He didn’t know how best to intervene. There was no logic to what had happened, nothing in the path of the oxen. And yet they had stopped abruptly. He took the rifle from his shoulder and went over to them. They were standing quite still and he thought he could see fear in their big heavy eyes. But there was nothing on the ground before them: no snake, no crevasse. The sand was flat. There were some rocks sticking up. That was all. He called Amos over and threw his arms out as if to ask why the oxen weren’t moving. Amos shook his head, he didn’t know. Bengler felt sweat streaming over him. Not the sweat that came from the burning sun, but sweat from his growing uncertainty. It was his responsibility to get the oxen moving. He walked around the animals and the wagon again, pretending to inspect the wheels as he tried to work out a solution. But there was no solution, because the problem was unknown. The oxen had stopped for reasons he could not discern.

By sheer chance he finally found the answer to the riddle. He had walked a few steps to the side, right in front of the lead ox, and kicked a rock that stuck up from the sand, revealing a piece of dark wood. With his foot he moved the sand and to his surprise found that what he was uncovering was part of a bow. He called the ox-drivers over and pointed at the tip of the bow. They immediately began an intense conversation with each other, first seriously, then more relieved, and finally they broke out laughing. Amos and one of the men he privately called the Consonants knelt down and began shovelling away the sand. Soon they uncovered the bow, a quiver, some arrows, braided leather thongs, and finally the skeleton. Now he understood that they had come across a Bushman grave. One evening at the brothel Wackman had told him that the Bushmen would bury their dead anywhere, and they returned to the area only when they could no longer remember exactly where the grave was located. The oxen had stopped because there was a grave in front of them. And they would have stood there until they fell over dead if the grave had not been discovered.

The grave belonged to a woman. Even though only parts of the skeleton remained, he could tell that it was a woman because he knew the difference between a male and a female pelvis. The teeth in the cranium were in very good condition. The seams in the skull’s parietal bone indicated that the woman was young when she died. He was struck by a sudden desire to explain all this to the ox-drivers, but since he didn’t have any language in which to communicate, he refrained. They dug a hole about fifty metres away, moved the skeleton, and filled it in. The oxen began to move again.

That evening he wrote a long letter to Matilda. I have discovered that I am a very lonely person. When I stood before the open grave and saw the skeleton of the woman who apparently died very young, it was as if I had finally found companionship. The feeling is hard to explain, and I won’t hesitate to say that it scares me too. For twenty-eight days I have conversed only with myself. In another twenty-eight days I need to meet a person with whom I can carry on a civilised conversation. Otherwise I’m afraid that it isn’t the desert and the heat that will kill me, but my loneliness.

Nineteen days after they first sighted the Bushmen they again saw a group of them moving like black dots along the horizon. The next day the first ox died. They butchered it and camped at the place where it fell. That night they heard the hyenas laughing in the dark.

When he woke in the morning and stepped out of his tent, Neka and one of the Consonants had vanished. They had taken large amounts of meat with them and half of the remaining water. For the first time he succumbed to a fit of rage and fired his revolver. He aimed straight at the sun and fired three times. The oxen grew restless but Amos managed to calm them. To avoid being abandoned in the middle of the desert, he took forceful measures that night. He tied both Amos and the other ox-driver to separate wagon wheels. He did it carefully and was surprised that they let him do it. Several times during the night he woke and dashed out of the tent because he was afraid they had got loose. But the men were sitting by the wheels, fast asleep.

He realised that the desert had already partially vanquished him. Now he no longer followed the maps: they went where the oxen led them. Soon the water and food would be gone. He took inventory and then wrote down a calculation in a letter to Matilda. The truth is now quite simple. If we don’t reach the trading post within ten days the journey will be over. My visit to the Kalahari Desert will then be finished. The question is whether I will have the courage to shoot myself or whether I will end up lying in the sand, being burned to death by the sun.

Apart from the beetle he had found only two other insects. A millipede that was close to twenty centimetres long, and a moth that lay dead next to the campfire one morning. He had identified both insects in his reference books. He forsaw that his museum would consist of these three jars. Someone who might come across the wagon buried in the sand would wonder who the madman was who had wandered around in this hell collecting insects in glass jars from which the alcohol had long since evaporated.

He counted down the days. When they were three days from the end, when all the food and all the water would be gone, Amos came down with a high fever. For a day and a night they were forced to remain encamped. Amos was delirious, whimpering like a baby, and Bengler was sure that they would soon have the expedition’s first burial. But by morning his fever had vanished as quickly as it came.

They pressed on. Just before the midday rest the second ox-driver began waving excitedly and pointing towards a spot that lay west of their route. It took a long time before Bengler managed to understand what the ox-driver had seen. At first it seemed that the sand was only quivering. But then he saw that there was a clump of trees and some houses. He heard a horse whinny in the distance. The oxen replied with dull bellowing.

At that instant he burst into tears. He turned away so that Amos and the other man would not see his weakness.

After a while he pulled himself together, dried off the traces of tears and urged on the oxen. They were now heading in a different direction. For the first time he had a goal.

Long afterwards he would try to recall what he had thought or felt at the moment they discovered the houses and heard the horse whinny. But there was only a vacuum of relief.

A little before three in the afternoon they arrived.

A man stood on the steps of the biggest house, waiting for them. He was missing two fingers on his right hand.

In resounding Swedish he said that his name was Wilhelm Andersson.

For him there was no doubt that Hans Bengler was Swedish.

No one but a Swedish shoemaker could have made leather boots as fine as those he was wearing.

Chapter 5

Wilhelm Andersson welcomed Bengler warmly. His handshake was so powerful that it felt like he was trying to crush his hand. Then Andersson took off his shirt, turned his back, and asked Bengler to cut open a boil between his shoulder blades that was inaccessible to his own hands. Bengler stared at the distended boil and recalled the time he had fainted in the Anatomy Theatre. He stroked the scar above his eye.

‘It’s probably best I don’t. I can’t tolerate the sight of blood.’

‘There won’t be any blood coming out, just greenish-yellow pus and maybe some worms or maggots.’

Andersson spat on a knife with an ivory handle and handed it to Bengler. His back was covered in odd cracks and swellings. It was as if the desert landscape had carved its presence into his skin.

‘I’ve never lanced a boil before.’

‘Stick the point in the middle and press. When it opens, cut downwards. And turn face your away so it doesn’t squirt in your eyes.’

Bengler put the knife point against the purple boil, shut his eyes and pressed. Then he squinted quickly and cut downwards. A viscous mess ran down Andersson’s back.

‘Take this towel here and wipe it off. Then we’ll eat.’

Still without looking, Bengler wiped off the mess and dropped the towel on the floor. Blood was trickling out of the incision now. Andersson gave him a piece of white cloth.

‘Put this over the cut. It’ll stick and stay on. The sweat makes it sticky.’

Bengler kept swallowing and swallowing so he wouldn’t vomit. Andersson wriggled into his shirt and buttoned it wrongly so that one edge hung down. He noticed but didn’t do anything about it.

Only now did Bengler realise that Andersson gave off a horrible stench. He tried to pull back a step and breathe through his mouth. But at the same time he remembered that he hadn’t been anywhere near a bath in almost two months. Water for washing was the first thing he had rationed, only a week after they left Cape Town.

Andersson led him into a room that was filled with animal trophies. The odour of decay and formalin was very strong. In the middle of the room was a hammock, identical to the one Bengler had slept in during the passage on Robertson’s schooner. It took a moment before he noticed that a short black man was standing motionless in the corner of the room. At first he thought it was a stuffed animal, but then he realised it was a live human being.

‘My only form of homesickness,’ said Andersson. ‘Or possibly it’s a sign of disgust. I’ve never been able to work out why I brought along a folk costume from Vänersborg and dressed my servant in it.’

This was a situation that Bengler had no background to help him understand. After two months in the desert he had reached a trading post where there was a Swede named Wilhelm Andersson who came from Vänersborg and dressed his valet in a Swedish folk costume.

‘I’ve tried to teach him to dance the polka,’ he said. ‘But he refuses. They prefer to leap. I’ve tried to explain that God doesn’t approve of leaping people. God is a higher being, higher than me, but we have the same view, that if there is dancing to be done it should take place in regular forms, in 3/4 time or 4/4 time. But they continue to leap and wiggle the most unexpected parts of the body.’

He offered Bengler a whisky and water. Bengler thought of his ox-drivers. Andersson instantly read his thoughts.

‘They will be taken care of,’ he said. ‘They’ll get water, food, conversation, be allowed to laugh, and at night there will be women who are warm and open. But you ought to shoot the oxen. You’ve driven the life out of them. Which brings me to the question: what are you doing here?’

Bengler felt the dizziness come as soon as he sipped the whisky. How can I explain something I can’t even explain to myself? he thought. Then, surprisingly even for him, he excused himself by fainting.

When he woke up he was lying in the hammock. The black man in the folk costume was fanning him with something that looked like a piece of oxhide above his head. Somewhere in the distance he could hear Andersson singing a hymn, off-key and vehement, as if he hated the tune. Bengler closed his eyes and thought that in a sense he had now arrived. He had no idea where he was, nor did he have any idea who the strange man was whose boil he had lanced, but he had indeed arrived. He had crept ashore on a strip of beach in this endless sea of sand. I ought to say a prayer, he thought. One that’s not as insincere as the hymn I’m hearing now. But who should I pray to? Matilda? She doesn’t believe in God. She’s afraid of God the same way she’s scared of the Devil. She’s just as terrified by heaven as by hell.

He didn’t say a prayer. He tried to catch the eye of the black man fanning him, but his gaze was far away, above Bengler’s head.

He suddenly had the feeling that he was in the very centre of the world. Right in the middle of something that for the first time in his life was completely real. Something that demanded he take a stand, have an opinion, make a choice.

He got no further with his thoughts. He noticed that the real reason why he had woken up was violent nausea. He leaned over the side of his hammock to throw up. The black man stopped fanning and cupped his hands to catch the vomit. Bengler didn’t manage to turn away. He sensed a kind of love in the fact that an unknown man in a folk costume from Västergötland accepted his spew in his cupped hands. He knew that his conclusion was wrong, that he would eventually change it, but right now he believed it was love. It was a mercy to be able to throw up into another person’s hands.

Exhausted, he sank back on the pillow. The black man wiped his face. Andersson was still out there somewhere bawling his hymn, which seemed to have an unlimited number of verses. Or was he repeating them? Or singing the hymn in different languages? Even though Bengler was very tired, very close to dropping off to sleep, he tried to listen. Then he realised that Andersson wasn’t singing the proper text. He was filling the verses of the hymn with his own words. He yelled at somebody named Lukas, who was supposed to have fixed a fence long ago. Then he sang about a raft that he once built on Lake Vänern, but soon returned to cursing Lukas, and Bengler realised that Andersson was either insane or drunk.

And yet he felt utterly safe.

He had survived in spite of everything. He had arrived somewhere. The magnet had loosened its grip. He had arrived at an unknown point where there were people, a bit of Sweden, something he could recognise.

He woke himself in the dark because he was snoring.

But when he opened his eyes the snoring continued. Andersson was asleep, rolled up in a zebra pelt next to a burning whale-oil lamp. Bengler crept carefully out of his hammock to take a piss. He fumbled his way in the dark towards a door or a curtain, and, without actually noticing how it happened, he found himself outside. In the distance some fires were burning. People were talking in low voices, shadows flickered, a baby cried softly. He shuddered from the sudden cold and the night wind. Then he took a piss. As usual he wrote some numbers with his stream of urine. This time a four and a nine. He finished half of an eight. Then he was done.

When he came in Andersson was awake. He sat wiping off soot from the glass of the whale-oil lamp.

‘While you were sleeping I tried to figure out who you were. I went through the load on your wagon. All I found was a number of books and plates of insects and some jars with worms and beetles in them. That was all. It’s like having a visit from a travelling insane asylum. Many people have passed through here, but none as crazy as you.’

He left the lamp alone and lit a pipe.

‘In your catechism I read that you were from Hovmantorp. I looked on my old map of Sweden, but I couldn’t find it. Either you’re lying when you write in your notebooks, or Hovmantorp is an unknown place, even though it surprises me that there are still blank spots in a country like Sweden.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘That’s not a very precise question. Where is here? In the desert? In Africa? Or in this room?’

‘In Africa.’

‘Nineteen years. It amazes me every day that I’m still alive. It also astonishes all the blacks around me. It astonishes the oxen and the ostriches and perhaps even the wild dogs. But sometimes I think maybe I’m already dead. Without having noticed it.’

He picked up a bottle of beer and took a drink.

‘If you hadn’t lanced that boil I probably would have died. If it gives you any satisfaction, I would gladly say that you came through the desert like a gentle saviour and saved my life.’

‘I was supposed to become a physician, but I wasn’t good enough.’

‘It’s common for Europeans who weren’t good enough to come to Africa. Here they can assert their skin colour and their god. Don’t have to be able to do anything, or want anything. Here you can live well by forcing people into submission. Illiterates from Germany come here and suddenly they’re the bosses of a hundred Africans whom they believe they are entitled to treat any way they like. East of this desert the Englishmen are doing the same thing; north of us sit the Portuguese, singing their sentimental songs and whipping the hide off their black workers. We export our skills to America. Those who come to Africa are either revivalist preachers or lazy brutes. And I’m neither a preacher nor a brute.’

‘What are you?’

‘I have foresight. I make deals.’

‘I met a man in Cape Town named Wackman. He spoke of the importance of realising that the piano will create great fortunes in the future.’

‘Exactly. For once that man is right. Wackman is a vile person. He slashes the soles of his whores’ feet so they’ll never forget him. His real passion is small boys with light brown skin. He rubs them with oil. Rumour has it that on one occasion, after having mounted such a lad, he found it so wonderful that he set fire to the boy. The oil made the boy burn very quickly.’

Bengler tried to assess whether Andersson was as cynical as he made out. How deep had the night cold and the loneliness actually penetrated him? Were there only frozen spaces inside, feelings embedded in blocks of ice, the same way that his beetles were drowned in alcohol? Or was there also something else?

‘I was searching for another focus in my life,’ Andersson said. ‘My father was a pharmacist and thought I ought to exhibit the same passion for liniment that he did. But I was born with a hatred of all salves. So I left. Stowed away on a wagon taking Lidköping porcelain to Gothenburg. And from there out into the world. Until I drifted ashore here. I went home one time, to bury my father. I arrived six months after he died, but they had left a hole in the ground so I could toss a little dirt on the coffin. Although I actually gave him desert sand. That was when I brought back the folk costume for Geijer.’

‘Is his name Geijer?’

‘I’ve forgotten his real name, but I christened him Geijer. A fine name. A clever fellow who wrote some poems that I still remember. Is he still alive?’

‘Erik Gustaf Geijer is dead.’

‘Everybody’s dead.’

‘You’re living in the middle of a desert.’

‘I hunt. I have the only trading post where the blacks are allowed inside. No Germans come here. They hate me the same way I hate them, because they know that I can see straight through them: their brutality, their fear.’

‘You hunt elephants?’

‘Nothing else. What were you thinking of putting in your empty glass jars?’

‘I’m going to catalogue insects. Systematise and name them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it hasn’t been done yet.’

Andersson looked at him for a long time before he replied.

‘That’s an answer I mistrust. Doing something just because it hasn’t been done yet.’

‘It’s the only answer I have.’

Andersson lay down and pulled a cover over himself.

‘You can stay here. I need company. Somebody to eat with, someone to lance my boils.’

‘I can’t pay you much.’

‘Company is enough.’

He stayed in the place that Andersson had named New Vänersborg. At the back of the room where he spent his first night there was another room where Andersson stored his elephant tusks. This room was emptied and cleaned, and he moved in. The ox-drivers were dismissed, the animals were slaughtered, and Andersson helped him find new draught animals and ox-drivers, although Bengler had a feeling that Andersson was using them to spy on him. Andersson knew everything he thought, all the plans he had. He also suspected Andersson of reading his diaries and rummaging through his clothing. They ate dinner and talked in the evenings. But now and then Andersson would withdraw with his bottles of beer when a very beautiful black woman came to visit. That’s when Bengler would feel a fierce desire for Matilda. He resumed his habit of masturbating two or three times a day.

Sometimes Andersson disappeared and might be away for several weeks at a time. During these periods the place was supervised by Geijer, who never seemed to take off his folk costume. The trading post carried salt, sugar, some grains, simple fabrics and ammunition. No money changed hands, everything was done on the barter system. The black men who showed up like lone ships in all that white came bearing tortoise shells or tusks. He never saw anything else. Then they vanished with their fabrics and their sacks. With Geijer he could hold simple conversations in Swedish. Andersson had taught him the language. For some strange reason Geijer spoke in the Gothenburg dialect. But since his vocabulary was limited and he always seemed to be struck by sadness when he didn’t understand what was said, Bengler never entered into very complicated discussions.

Besides, he had his insects. The jars were slowly starting to fill up. But after seven months he had not yet found any insect that he could say with absolute certainty was unknown.

One evening when he had been with Andersson for four months, he found a woman lying on the floor underneath his hammock when he went to bed. She was naked, with only a thin cover over her, and he guessed that she was no more than sixteen years old. He lay down in his hammock and listened to her breathing there below him. That night he slept fitfully and didn’t properly fall asleep until dawn. When he opened his eyes she was gone. He asked Andersson who she was.

‘I sent her for you. You can’t be without a woman any more. You’re starting to act strangely.’

‘I want to choose a woman myself.’

‘She’ll stay until you’ve chosen. And she wants to.’

Andersson’s reply made him angry. But he didn’t show it.

For another night he slept in the hammock with the woman beneath him on the floor. The third night he lay down by her side, and after that he spent every night on the floor. She was very warm, with a kind of quiet affection that surprised him, because he had never experienced that with Matilda. She was always serious, kept her eyes closed, and only occasionally touched his back with her hands.

She seemed to fall asleep at the same moment he had his orgasm.

Her name was Benikkolua, and he never heard her cry. But she sang almost constantly, when she was cleaning his room, shaking his clothes, and carefully arranging his papers on the desk Andersson had given him.

He wanted her to teach him her language; not just the distinctive clicking sounds. He would point at various objects and she would pronounce the words. He wrote them down and she laughed when he tried to imitate her.

Every night he slipped inside her, and wondered who he actually was. To her. Was he committing an outrage or was she there of her own free will? Was Andersson paying her something that he didn’t know about?

He tried to ask Andersson about it. But he kept repeating that she was there because she wanted to be.

Andersson’s love life, on the other hand, seemed very complicated. He had a woman in Cape Town who had borne him three children, another family in distant Zanzibar, and several women who at irregular intervals came wandering through the desert to spend one or two nights with him.

All these women were black, of course. On one occasion as they were eating dinner, Andersson suddenly started talking about being in love with a preacher’s daughter in Vänersborg when he was very young. But he fell silent as abruptly as he had begun.

The next day he took off into the desert to hunt elephants.

Nine months passed. Then Bengler finally found his insect. It was an insignificant beetle that he could not identify. Because it had short, possibly undeveloped legs he was not even sure that it was a beetle at first. But he was convinced by the time he stuffed it into his jar and screwed on the lid.

He had succeeded. He ought to return to Sweden and enter this new discovery in the scientific registers.

The thought upset him. How could he return? And to what?

He had found the beetle during an expedition that kept him away from New Vänersborg for two weeks.

When he returned he found Andersson inside the shop. A wagonload of salt had arrived.

But there was something else there as well. On the floor stood something that looked like a calf pen. In it lay a boy who stared at him when he leaned forward to take a look.

Chapter 6

When he saw the boy in the pen it was like looking at himself. Why, he didn’t know. And yet he was sure: the boy who lay there was himself. He cast an enquiring look at Andersson, who was instructing Geijer on how to stack the sacks of salt to avoid the moisture, which in some strange way even reached this remote outpost in the desert.

‘What’s this here?’ Bengler asked.

‘I got him in trade for a sack of flour.’

‘Why is he lying here?’

‘I don’t know. He has to be somewhere.’

Bengler felt himself getting upset. Andersson and his damned salt. When a boy was lying on the bottom of a filthy crate.

‘Who would trade a live human being for a sack of dead flour?’

‘Some relative. His parents are dead. There was apparently a clan war. Or maybe a feud. Maybe it was the Germans who arranged to hunt down some natives. They often do that. The boy has no one. If I had said no to the trade he would have just disappeared in the sand.’

‘Does he have a name?’

‘Not that I know of. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with him either, so he’ll have to stay here. Just like you. A temporary visitor who ends up staying.’

Bengler realised at that instant what he had to do. He didn’t need any time to think it over. Now he had found his beetle, he would return to Sweden. The dream of insects no longer excited him, but the boy lying there in the crate, or animal pen, was real.

‘I’ll adopt him. I’ll take him with me.’

For the first time since the conversation began, Andersson was interested. He set down a sack of salt on the planks and looked at Bengler with distaste.

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me. I’ll adopt him.’

‘And?’

‘There isn’t any “and”. There’s only the future. I’m going home. I’m taking him with me.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘I can give him a life there. Here he will perish. Just as you said.’

Andersson spat. Instantly Geijer was there, wiping it up with a rag. Bengler recalled with shame how he had once let himself vomit into Geijer’s hands.

‘What sort of life do you think you can give him?’

‘Something better than this.’

‘You think he’ll survive? A journey by sea? The cold in Sweden? The snow and the wind and all the taciturn people? You’re not only crazy, you’re conceited too. Have you found that insect yet?’

Bengler showed him his jar. ‘A beetle. With peculiar legs. It hasn’t been named.’

‘You’re going to kill the boy.’

‘On the contrary. Tell me how much you want for him.’

Andersson smiled. ‘A promise. That some day you come back and tell me what happened to him.’

Bengler nodded. He promised, without thinking it over.

‘I’ll keep the crate,’ said Andersson. ‘You can have the vermin free.’

He motioned to Geijer to lift the boy out of the pen. He was very small. Bengler guessed that he was eight or nine years old. He squatted down in front of him. When he smiled the boy closed his eyes, as if he wanted to make himself invisible. Bengler decided to give the boy a name. That was the most important thing of all. A person without a name did not exist. He thought first of his own last name. What would go with it?

‘You can call him Lazarus,’ suggested Andersson, who had read his thoughts again. ‘Wasn’t he the one who was raised from the dead? Or why not Barabbas? Then he can hang by your side on the cross you nail together for him.’

Bengler felt like killing Andersson. If he were strong enough. But Andersson would only shake him off like an insect.

‘You don’t think Barabbas is a good suggestion?’

Bengler could feel himself sweating. ‘Barabbas was a thief. We’re talking about giving an abandoned child a name.’

‘What does he know about what’s written in the Bible?’

‘One day he will know. Then how will I explain why I named him after a thief?’

Andersson burst out laughing. ‘I believe you mean what you say. That you’ll take the boy across the sea and that he’ll survive. To think that I’ve had such a damned idiot under my roof.’

‘I’ll be leaving soon.’

Andersson threw out his arms as if in a gesture of peace.

‘Perhaps I could call him David,’ said Bengler.

Andersson frowned. ‘I don’t remember him. What did he do?’

‘He fought Goliath.’

Andersson nodded.

‘Might be suitable. Because he will have to fight against a Goliath.’

‘Joseph,’ Andersson said suddenly. ‘The one who was cast out. Joseph is a fine name.’

Bengler shook his head. His father’s middle name was Joseph.

‘No good.’

‘Why not?’

‘It brings back unpleasant memories,’ Bengler replied hesitantly.

Andersson didn’t ask why.

While they were speaking the boy stood motionless. Bengler realised that he was waiting for something terrible to happen. He expected to be beaten, maybe killed.

‘Did he see what happened to his parents?’

Andersson shrugged his shoulders. He had returned to the salt. Geijer was balancing at the top of a ladder.

‘It’s possible. I didn’t ask much. Why ask about something like that when it’s better not to know? I’ve seen the way the Germans hunt these people the way you hunt rats.’

Bengler placed his hand on the boy’s head. His body was tense. He still had his eyes shut.

At that moment Bengler knew.

The boy would be called Daniel. Daniel who had sat in the lions’ den. That was a fitting name.

‘Daniel,’ Bengler said. ‘Daniel Bengler. It sounds like a Jew. But since you’re black you can’t be a Jew. Now you have a name.’

‘He’s crawling with lice. And besides, he’s undernourished. Fatten him up and wash him. Otherwise he’ll be dead before you even get to Cape Town. Before he even knows that he’s been given a Christian name.’

That night Bengler burned the boy’s clothes. He scrubbed him in a wooden tub and put one of his shirts on him that reached to his ankles. Benikkolua was always close by. She had wanted to wash the boy but Bengler wanted to do it himself. That way the boy’s mute fear might subside. So far he hadn’t said a single word. His mouth was closed tight. Even when Bengler wanted to give him food he refused to open it. He thinks that his life will fly away if he opens his lips, Bengler thought.

He asked Benikkolua to try. But the boy still wouldn’t open his mouth.

Andersson stood aside and watched it all.

‘Take a pair of pliers and prise it open,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this coddling. If you want to save his life you can’t treat him with kid gloves.’

Bengler didn’t reply. It would be a relief to get away from Andersson. In spite of all the help he had received, Bengler realised that he hadn’t liked him right from their very first meeting, when he was forced to poke a hole in the boil on his back. He thought that Andersson was no different from the Germans or the Portuguese or the Englishmen who tormented the blacks and hunted them like rats. Except that Andersson exercised his brutality with discretion. What difference was there between clapping a person in irons and dressing someone up in a ridiculous Swedish folk costume? He thought that he ought to tell Andersson all this, to show him, in parting, that he saw right through him. But he knew that he lacked the courage. Andersson was too strong for him. Compared to him, Bengler belonged to an insignificant caste that would never have power over the desert.

That night Benikkolua had to sleep outside the door. Bengler left the boy alone on the mattress with the plate of food by his side. Then he put out the lamp and lay down in his hammock. Unlike Benikkolua, whose breathing he could always hear, the boy was silent. A sudden apprehension made him get up. He lit the lamp. The boy was awake, but his jaws were still clamped tightly shut. Bengler placed a beam across the door and returned to his hammock.

In the morning when he woke the boy had eaten all the food. Now he was asleep. His mouth was slightly open.

Three days later Bengler made his last preparations before leaving. He had loaded and lashed down his possessions on the wagon. The boy had still not said a single word. He sat mute on the floor or in the shade with his eyes closed. Bengler stroked his head now and then. His body was very tense.

Bengler had tried to explain to Benikkolua that he had to leave. Whether she understood or not he couldn’t tell. How could he explain what an ocean was? Like expanses of sand but made out of rainwater? What was a distance, really? How far away was Sweden anyway? He realised that he would miss her, even though he didn’t know a thing about her. Her body, he knew, but not who she was.

He spent his last evening with Andersson. They ate ostrich meat boiled in a herbal stock. Andersson had brought out a pot of wine. As if to indicate that it was an important day, he had put on a clean shirt. The while time that Bengler stayed at the trading post he had never seen Andersson wash, but he had grown used to the stench and didn’t notice it any more. Andersson soon got drunk. Bengler drank cautiously. He was afraid of having a hangover the next day when he set off across the desert.

‘I just might miss your company,’ Andersson said. ‘But I know that sooner or later some other Swedish madman will come marching this way. With yet another meaningless task to perform.’

‘My task has not been meaningless. Besides, I’ve acquired a son.’

‘The hell you’ve acquired a son. You’re going to kill that boy. Maybe he’ll survive the boat trip. But then? What are you going to do then?’

‘I’ll see to it that he has a good life.’

‘How are you going to do that? Are you going to pin him down the way people pin down insects? Are you going to paste him into one of your volumes of prints?’

Bengler wanted to counter these shameless accusations, but he didn’t know how. Andersson was still too strong for him. It was their last evening, and these accusations or insults would never be repeated, they would merely fall lifeless when his wagon rolled away. Yet he would have liked to have resised him more firmly.

‘Your life is not merely peculiar,’ he said. ‘Above all, it’s miserable. You pretend to oppose what is going on in this desert. This hunting down of people who have done nothing but live in this place. You pretend to be upset, pretend to love your fellow man, pretend to be a good person. But from what I’ve seen you’re just as rotten as all the other whites here. Except for one person: myself.

‘I very seldom whip my Negroes. I don’t pinch them with tongs, don’t box their ears, don’t teach them the catechism. I do keep order, it’s true. But I don’t rip them up by the roots so they’ll fall dead in the snow of Sweden. I ask you a very simple question: which is worse?’

‘I’ll prove you’re wrong.’

‘You have given me your promise. To come back. And tell me.’

They ate the rest of the dinner in silence. Andersson was soon so drunk that his gaze began to wander beyond the light from the whale-oil lamp. It struck Bengler that he resembled a confused insect at night, searching for a point of light that should not have been there.

That night, as his last note to Matilda, he wrote: Tomorrow I set off. Andersson fluttered like a moth around the lamp. I don’t know if he is an evil man. But he is a foolish man. He refuses to see through his own actions. Because I drank two glasses of wine I began to fantasise that he was actually an insect that I had pinned down on a sheet of white paper.

He still hadn’t made a single note about Daniel. He had decided to wait until they left. When the trading post disappeared behind them he would begin to write about him.

Daniel was sleeping on the rug. His mouth was still shut tight. Bengler wondered what he was dreaming about.

Despite the fact that he was tipsy and had also had to drag Andersson to bed, he managed to have one last moment of love with Benikkolua that night. He had stumbled out of the room where the ivory was once stored and tripped over her where she lay on her raffia mat. As usual she was naked under her thin cover. He was surprised that she never seemed to be chilly in the cold desert night.

In the morning he woke very early. The sun had not yet risen. Daniel was asleep. Bengler went silently out of the door. Benikkolua was gone. She had taken her raffia mat with her. But she had hung up the thin cover on a projecting edge of the roof. It waved like a farewell to him, Benikkolua’s flag. It brought tears to his eyes and he thought it was as crazy for him to leave as it had once been to come here.

He had just as many questions, and just as few answers.

He was sure of one thing. The responsibility he had assumed for the boy lying in Andersson’s pen was something he did not intend to regret. What he wasn’t able to give himself perhaps he could give to someone else.

Bengler waited until Daniel woke up, then he smiled, put his best shirt on him and carried him outside. When Daniel caught sight of the wagon with the oxen hitched up, he suddenly began to shriek and flail about. Bengler held him tight, but the boy was like a wildcat. When he sank his teeth into Bengler’s nose he had to let him go. The boy ran straight out into the desert. Bengler followed him with blood running down his face.

For an instant he thought he would have to hit him, but when he caught the boy the thought was already gone. He was still howling and flailing his arms but this time Bengler didn’t let go, and dragged him back to the wagon. He tied him down with the baggage, just as he had once bound Amos and the other ox-driver to the wagon wheels. The boy pulled and tore at the rope, and his screams cut through Bengler like knives, but he couldn’t change his mind now.

Andersson had come out onto the steps and was watching the commotion.

‘I see you’re leaving,’ he shouted. ‘A quiet departure. I just don’t understand why you have to torment the boy. What has he done to you?’

Bengler rushed towards Andersson. Now he had no more fear.

‘I intend to save him from you.’

Then he threw himself on Andersson. They rolled about in the sand. Andersson had met the attack with a roar. Around them stood black people silently watching the white men fighting like madmen.

Then it was over. Andersson knocked Bengler to the ground with a punch to the stomach. It took several minutes before he caught his breath.

‘Leave now. But come back and tell me how the boy died.’

Andersson turned and went into the house. In the wagon the boy continued screaming and tearing at the rope. Bengler wiped the blood off his face and called to the ox-drivers.

The black men stood silent.

For a moment Bengler thought he had made a mistake.

But he quickly dispensed with the thought.

The boy didn’t stop crying until late in the afternoon. He fell completely silent suddenly, without warning, and closed his eyes with his mouth shut tight.

Will I ever understand what he’s thinking? Walking beside the wagon, Bengler watched him for a long time. Then he loosened the rope. The boy didn’t move. He knows that I wish him only the best, thought Bengler. It will take time. But already he is beginning to understand.

When they reached Cape Town a few weeks later, Bengler heard that Wackman was dead. He had had a stroke at his brothel, which had now been taken over by a man from Belgium.

Daniel had stopped shrieking. He didn’t speak and never smiled, but he ate the food Bengler gave him. Yet Bengler was still uncertain whether he might try to escape again, so he always tied him up at night and kept the end of the rope wound around his own wrist.

In early July they boarded a French freighter, a barque, that was bound for Le Havre. The captain, whose name was Michaux, promised that there would be no difficulty in finding a ship there to take them to Sweden. The money that Bengler got for the wagon and the oxen paid for their passage.

Late in the evening of 7 July 1877, they set sail from Cape Town. Bengler was afraid that Daniel would throw himself overboard, the way the slaves used to do, so he made sure he was tied up when they were standing by the railing.

Daniel kept his eyes closed.

Bengler wondered what he was seeing behind those eyelids of his.

Chapter 7

The ship was called the Chansonette and had come most recently from Goa on the Indian peninsula. Steamy aromas of mysterious spices that Bengler had never smelled before wafted up from the holds. When he took a promenade on deck he discovered some strange iron fittings screwed into the planks. At first he couldn’t identify them other than as vague images from his memory. Then he remembered that he had once seen them in a comprehensive English book of plates that illustrated in detail the instruments and tools with which slaves were held captive during the journey to the West Indies. So he found himself on a former slave ship. It aroused a violent discomfort in him. The scrubbed deck was suddenly filled with blood that smelled stronger than the spices loaded in sacks and barrels down in the holds. He looked at Daniel, whom he was leading on a rope. So that Daniel wouldn’t tear himself loose in one of the quick and always unexpected lunges he made at irregular intervals, Bengler had designed a harness for him. He had explained to the captain that Daniel was his adopted son and was going with him to Europe. Michaux hadn’t asked any questions or shown the least sign of curiosity. Bengler asked him to inform the crew that Daniel’s unpredictable moods made it necessary to keep him in a harness: it was a safety measure, not a display of cruelty. Michaux called over one of his mates, a Dutchman named Jean, and asked him to tell the crew.

They had been given a cabin near the stern, right next to the captain’s quarters. After attempting to break free in a violent fit of desperation, Daniel had sunk into apathy. To calm him, Bengler had strewn a thin layer of sand on the floor. He had tried to explain that the ship was big and safe. The sea was no monster, the slight motion of the hull nothing more than the same motion that Daniel must have felt when he was carried around on his mother’s back.

A young ship’s boy, barely fifteen years old, had been assigned by Michaux to take care of the five passengers on board. Along on the journey were an elderly bachelor who had terrible smallpox scars on his face, and a very young lady who immediately became the object of the crew’s lustful glances. Except for the fact that the man’s name was Stephen Hartlefield, Bengler knew nothing about him or to what he had devoted his life. Captain Michaux had brusquely informed Bengler that the pockmarked man was an Englishman with cancer in his belly, and he was going home to Devonshire to die.

‘He came to Africa when he was two years old,’ said Michaux. ‘Yet he still talks about travelling home to die in a country that he has no memory of. Englishmen are very strange creatures.’

The young lady, whose name was Sara Dubois, had been visiting one of her sisters who lived on a big farm outside Cape Town. She belonged to a well-to-do merchant family from Rouen and had a chambermaid with her.

The cabin boy’s name was Raul. He was freckled, cross-eyed and alert. Bengler noticed that Daniel watched him for a moment, and caught his eye.

Raul asked why Daniel was being restrained.

‘Otherwise he might jump overboard,’ Bengler answered, feeling despondent about his reply. Something made him feel ashamed that he had to keep a fellow human being tied up. A human being that he regarded as his son.

‘Will he always be tied up?’ Raul asked.

Instead of replying, Bengler called over one of the mates and complained about the cabin boy’s nosy curiosity. The mate boxed him twice on the ears.

Raul didn’t cry, even though the blows were very hard.

They left Cape Town in the evening. Heavy rain clouds swept in over Tafelberg. Bengler had decided to keep Daniel in the cabin as they pulled away from land and not let him out until they were on the high seas. The sea was very calm that night and slow swells bore the ship away from the African continent. Daniel slept in the hammock. Bengler had tied the rope to one of the ceiling beams. Even though it was a low ceiling, Daniel wouldn’t be able to reach the beam and untie it. Bengler had also checked that there were no sharp objects in the cabin that he could use to cut himself loose.

When Bengler placed a blanket over Daniel he discovered that in one hand, which was clenched tightly, he held some sand that he had picked up off the floor.

That first evening Bengler began to sew a sailor’s costume for Daniel. He had procured the cloth from a nautical outfitter recommended by Michaux. Since he had spent all his money on the passage, he bartered for the cloth with the revolver he had bought in Copenhagen. It had also sufficed for buttons, needle and thread. He borrowed scissors from the sailmaker on board. He spread out the cloth on the table in the cabin and then pondered for a long time over how he could actually make a pair of trousers and a sailor’s blouse. It took a while before he dared begin cutting. He had never before in his life made anything like this. The work proceeded slowly, and he pricked himself with the scissors and the needle that he used to sew together the various pieces. Late that night, as he crept up into his hammock next to Daniel, he hid the scissors in a cavity between two timbers up in the ceiling.

Before he went to sleep he lay still and listened to Daniel’s breathing. It was irregular and restless. He felt Daniel’s forehead but could detect no sign of fever. He’s dreaming, he thought. Some day he’ll be able to tell me what he was thinking when we left Cape Town.

The odours from the holds were very strong. In the distance he could hear some of the sailors laughing. Then it was quiet again apart from occasional footsteps on deck and the ship creaking against the swells.

The journey to Le Havre took a little over a month. They went through two storms and were becalmed for six days in between them. The African continent could be glimpsed now and then like an evasive mirage in the east. The heat was relentless. The captain was worried about his cargo of spices and several times went below deck to check that nothing was getting damp.

On the very first day Bengler had decided that Daniel needed a routine. After eating the breakfast that Raul brought in to them, they began taking walks on deck. The man from Devonshire seldom appeared. According to Raul he was in severe pain and ate almost nothing but strong medicines, which left him constantly in a trance-like state. The merchant’s daughter from Rouen played badminton with her chambermaid when the weather permitted. Bengler noticed that the ship then seemed to breathe in a different way. The crew devoutly hoped that the girls’ skirts would blow up and expose a leg or perhaps a bit of their undergarments. During their walks, Bengler talked to Daniel constantly. He pointed and explained and alternated speaking German and Swedish. Slowly he thought he could feel the tension in Daniel begin to relax. He was still somewhere else, with parents who were still alive, far away from Andersson’s pen and the ship that rose and fell, but he’s getting closer, Bengler thought. The further away from Africa, the closer to me.

Bengler realised that he had to show Daniel that the harness was a temporary solution for what he hoped would be an equally temporary problem. The rope situation could only be solved by a growing trust. On the second day aboard, Bengler left the scissors he had borrowed from the sailmaker on the table and let Daniel stay alone in the cabin. He waited outside the closed door, ready for Daniel to cut the rope and then rush out of the door to try to cast himself into the sea.

After half an hour nothing had happened.

When Bengler went into the cabin the scissors lay on the table. Daniel was sitting on the floor drawing with his finger in the sand that still covered the floorboards. Bengler decided to take the harness off the boy. The feeling that he had committed an injustice filled him once again with discomfort. But he also experienced something that could only be vanity. He didn’t want to admit that Wilhelm Andersson was right. That he should not have taken the boy with him. He didn’t want to have his good intentions questioned, even if only by a man he would never meet again. A man who lived in the midst of far-reaching hypocrisy at a remote trading post in the Kalahari Desert.

Bengler went out on deck. The Chansonette was sailing in a light wind. The sails were full. He remembered how it had been when he came to Africa on Robertson’s black schooner, when he had felt masts and sails inside himself. He stood by the railing and looked down at the water. The sails flapped like birds’ wings above his head, a play of sunshine and shadow.

For the first time he seriously asked himself the question: what would he actually do when he got back to Sweden? The beetle with the peculiar legs lay in its jar. And he had Daniel too. In two big leather trunks he had 340 different insects he had collected, prepared and arranged according to Linnaeus’s system. But the question remained unanswered. The thought of returning to Lund was not only repugnant to him, it was impossible. It was tempting to see Matilda again. But it also frightened him, because he was convinced that she had already forgotten him, forgotten their hours of lovemaking, which were never passionate, and the port wine afterwards. He didn’t even know if she was still alive. Maybe she had wound up under Professor Enander’s scalpel too. He didn’t know, and he realised that he didn’t want to know.

The only thing he knew for sure would be waiting for him was the obligatory trip to Hovmantorp to confirm that his father had really died the same night he had the premonition. But then what?

He sought the answer in the sea foaming in the wake of the Chansonette.

A seaman had silently stepped up next to him. He scratched out his pipe, spat, and stared at Bengler. The skin on his face was like leather, his nose was wide, his mouth dry with cracked lips and his eyes squinted.

‘What do you want that damned boy for?’ asked the sailor.

He spoke Norwegian. Bengler had once been friends with a young man from Røros who studied theology in Lund. He had been amused by the language and had learned to imitate it.

He thought he ought to ignore the question, which largely came from the squinty eyes and not out of the cracked lips.

‘Are you going to kill the boy?’

Bengler considered complaining to the captain. As a paying passenger he shouldn’t have to associate with the crew except on his own terms.

‘I can’t see that it’s any of your business.’

The sailor’s eyes were steady. Bengler got the feeling that he was facing a reptile that might strike him at any time. Just as Daniel had sunk his teeth into his nose.

‘I can’t bear it,’ said the sailor. ‘Africa is a continent from hell. There we make our whips whistle, we cut off the ears and hands of people who don’t work at the pace we determine. And now we’re starting to drag home their children even though slavery is forbidden.’

Bengler grew angry.

‘He has no parents. I’m looking after him. What’s so bad about helping a person survive?’

‘Is that why you have him on a lead like a dog? Have you taught him to bark?’

Bengler moved off down the railing. For a brief moment he felt dizzy. The sun was suddenly very strong. He wished he had his revolver. Then he would have shot the damned Norwegian. The sailor was still standing there, his eyes squinting. He had on a striped jumper, trousers cut off just below the knees, and shoes with gaping holes in them.

‘The times are changing,’ said the sailor, moving closer.

‘You have no right to bother me like this.’

‘Let me guess: you bought him. Maybe to exhibit him at the variety show? Or in marketplaces? A Hottentot. Maybe you’re intending to make him puff himself up like an ape. Could be money in that.’

Bengler was at a loss for words. He thought the sailor must be a revolutionary, a rock-thrower, an iconoclast. Maybe he belonged to that new movement they had discussed during the late nights in Lund. An anarchist? Someone who didn’t throw bombs but flung words at him with the same power?

The sailor lit his pipe.

‘One day people like you won’t exist,’ he said. ‘People have to be free. Not tied up like lap dogs.’

During the rest of the journey to Le Havre Bengler did not exchange another word with the sailor. He found out that his name was Christiansen and was regarded by most as a competent and friendly man. He also had the virtue of never imbibing strong drink. This information was gathered by Raul, who Bengler had soon learned was a reliable reporter.

When he took the harness off Daniel he imagined that there would be a reaction of joy, of liberation. But Daniel’s only response was immediately to crawl up into the hammock and go to sleep. As always he had some grains of sand gripped in his fist. Bengler was puzzled. If he saw himself in Daniel, how would he decipher the fact that the boy was sleeping?

A great pain has left him, he thought. It’s natural to rest when an affliction is over, be it a toothache, colic or headache. That’s what he’s doing, sleeping it off now that the pain has left him.

Two days before they docked at Le Havre, the man with cancer who was going to Devonshire died. Since the captain was worried about his spices and they were becalmed that day, a burial at sea was arranged. Bengler was very depressed when he thought that the man would never return home. During the funeral itself he locked Daniel in the cabin.

Besides their regular promenades, Bengler had given Daniel instruction every day. There were two subjects. First, he had to learn Swedish if possible. Second, he had to learn to wear shoes. Initially Daniel was amused by the shoes, but after a while he grew tired of them. On one occasion he flung one of the simple wooden shoes over the railing. Bengler was angry but managed to control himself. He had been given another pair of small worn-out shoes by a carpenter, and he started again. Daniel showed no interest whatsoever, but he did not throw the shoes overboard.

With the language, on the other hand, no progress was made at all. Bengler realised that Daniel simply refused to take in the words. And he could find no way to counter his refusal.

When they docked at Le Havre on a foggy morning in early August, Bengler felt a growing unrest inside. Why in hell had he let his impulses get the better of him and dragged this boy along?

At first he had been afraid that the boy would jump overboard. Now he was afraid that he would throw the boy overboard himself.

The last thing he saw when he went ashore was the sailor squinting at him. His look was as cold as the fog.

In the middle of August Bengler and Daniel boarded a coal lighter heading for Simrishamn. Bengler was granted passage if he helped with various tasks on board. The ship was dilapidated and smelled foul. For the entire trip Bengler worried that they would never arrive.

On 2 September the vessel docked at Simrishamn. By then Bengler had been away from Sweden for almost a year and a half.

When he stepped ashore he realised that the fear he felt was shared by Daniel.

They had grown closer to each other.

Chapter 8

The day they landed a strange thing happened. For Bengler it was a sign. For the first time he seriously thought he had deciphered something from all the unclear and often contradictory signals that Daniel sent out.

From the dock they had walked straight across the muddy harbour square and into a little inn located in one of the alleyways leading down to the water. The innkeeper, who was drunk, had looked in consternation at Daniel, who was standing at Bengler’s side. Could it be a little black-coloured monster that had hopped out of his delirious brain? But the man standing next to the boy spoke in a refined manner. Even though he had arrived from Cape Town, he didn’t seem to be infected with any tropical disease that might prove worrisome. The man gave them a room facing the courtyard. The room was very dark and cramped. It smelled of mould, and Bengler searched his memory; somewhere he had smelled exactly this same smell. Then he recalled that it was the coat worn by an itinerant Jewish liniment pedlar he had met during his last visit to Hovmantorp. He opened the window to air out the room. It was early autumn, just after a heavy rain, and there was a wet smell from the courtyard. Daniel sat motionless on a chair in his sailor suit. He had kicked off the wooden shoes.

Bengler poured himself a glass of port to muster his courage for the future and to celebrate the fact that the coal lighter had not sunk during the voyage from Le Havre. In the courtyard children could be heard shrieking and laughing. He was sitting on the creaky bed with the glass in his hand when Daniel suddenly stood up and went over to the window. Bengler started to move from the bed because he was afraid the boy might jump out, but Daniel walked very slowly, almost stalking as if on the hunt, cautiously approaching a quarry. He stopped by the window, half hidden behind the curtain, to watch what was happening in the courtyard. He stood utterly motionless. Bengler cautiously got up and stood next to him.

Down in the courtyard two girls were skipping. They were about the same age as Daniel. One of the girls was fat, the other very thin. They had a rope, possibly a line from a small sailing boat which they had cut off to a suitable length. They took turns jumping, laughing when they stumbled, and then starting over again. For a long time Daniel stood quite still, as if turned to stone. Bengler watched him and tried to interpret his attentive observation of the game in the courtyard.

Then Daniel turned to him, looked him straight in the eye, and his face broke into a grin.

That was the first time Bengler saw his adopted son smile. It was not a broad, pasted-on mask, but a smile that came from within. For Bengler it was as though a long-awaited miracle had finally occurred. At last Daniel had severed the invisible line that bound him to the pen at Andersson’s trading post. A line that bound him to memories which Bengler knew nothing about, except that they contained blood, terror, dead bodies, chopped-up body parts, desperate screams, and then a silence in which all that was heard was the sand rustling in the desert.

They went down to the courtyard. The girls stopped skipping when they caught sight of Daniel. Bengler realised that they had never seen a black person before. He knew that there was a brand of shoe polish whose lid was decorated with a black man with a broad grin and thick lips, but now these young girls were looking at a real live black person. Here in this dirty courtyard Bengler discovered something that might be a new task for him. To show the unenlightened Swedes that people actually existed who were black. Living people, not just decorated lids on tins.

He began talking to the girls. They were poorly dressed and their constant jumping had made them smell strongly of sweat. He asked their names and had a hard time understanding what they said. One of them was named Anna, the thin one, and the fat one was called Elin or possibly Elina. Bengler explained that the boy next to him was named Daniel and that he had just landed in Simrishamn from a faraway desert in Africa.

‘What’s he doing here?’ asked the girl called Anna.

Bengler was at a loss for words. To this simple question, he had no answer.

‘He’s on a temporary visit to Sweden,’ he said finally.

He wasn’t sure if the girls really understood what he said because of his thick Småland dialect.

‘Why does he have such curly hair? Did he have it curled?’ It was still the girl called Anna who was asking.

‘It’s naturally curly,’ Bengler replied.

‘Can we touch it?’

Bengler looked at Daniel. He was still smiling, so Bengler nodded. The girls came forward warily and touched Daniel’s head. Bengler was constantly on guard, as if he were watching a dog that without warning might turn hostile and bite. But Daniel continued to smile. When the fat girl who was maybe named Elin put her hand on his head, he stretched out his hand and carefully stroked her mousy-coloured hair. She gave a shriek and jumped away. Daniel kept smiling.

‘He wants to watch while you skip,’ said Bengler. ‘Won’t you show him?’

The girls skipped. When the fat girl stumbled Daniel started to laugh. It was a lusty laugh that came from deep inside, a dammed-up volcano that had finally found its release.

‘Can he skip?’

Bengler nodded at Daniel and pointed at the rope. Without hesitation Daniel took it in his hands. He jumped very lightly, did double hops and turned the rope backwards and forwards at a rapid tempo. Bengler was astonished. He had never imagined that Daniel could skip. The experience filled him with shame. Had he really believed that Daniel could master nothing but silence and introversion? Had he regarded him more as an animal than a human being?

‘He doesn’t even get sweaty,’ shrieked the fat girl.

Daniel kept on skipping. He never seemed to tire. Bengler had a feeling that Daniel wasn’t really hopping up and down, but that he was on his way somewhere, as if he were actually running.

He’s back in the desert, thought Bengler. That’s where he is. Not here, in a filthy back courtyard in Simrishamn.

When the game was over, Daniel wasn’t even out of breath. He put down the rope and took Bengler’s hand. That was something that hadn’t happened before either. Before it was always Bengler who took his hand. Something has happened, Bengler thought. From now on something will be different between us. But what has changed, I don’t know.

That evening, after Daniel had fallen asleep, Bengler started a new diary. He decided to call it ‘Daniel’s Book’ and printed the title carefully on the cover. From a nearby inn he could hear a tremendous racket of bellowing voices and a screeching fiddle. Daniel was asleep. Through the thin walls Bengler could hear a couple making love in the room next door. He tried to shut out the sounds, but they were loud and he started to feel excited. He tried to imagine the bodies, the man grunting and the woman squealing, picturing himself in there with Matilda or Benikkolua. After he had printed the title he took off his trousers and masturbated. He tried to follow the rhythm from the creaking bed and came at the same time as the squealing and grunting reached a crescendo.

Then he began to write. The book was going to be a study of the encounter between Daniel and Europe. The starting point was a distant desert and a dirty courtyard where a black boy was skipping with two girls.

What is a human being exactly? Bengler wrote at the top of the first page. That question could not be answered. God was inscrutable, He was a mystery, in the same way the Holy Scriptures were labyrinths and riddles that concealed more riddles. The only answer that existed was that which could be proven, which could be deduced from observations.

The example of Daniel, he continued. Today, 2 September 1877, I have seen a black boy from the desert playing with two girls in a back courtyard in the town of Simrishamn. From this point a journey begins, perhaps it can be called an expedition, which deals with Daniel and his meeting with a specific country in Europe.

That night Bengler slept peacefully. In his dreams the bed moved as if he were still on board a ship. Occasionally he woke up and opened his eyes. In the light autumn night he could see Daniel’s face quite clearly against the white sheet. He was sleeping. His breathing was calm. Just before three o’clock Bengler got up and sat next to Daniel and took his pulse.

It was regular, fifty-five beats per minute.

After a difficult and bumpy journey they arrived in Lund two days later. During the trip Bengler had been struck several times by acute diarrhoea. His stomach had always been the most sensitive organ in his body. At the slightest sign of anxiety it rebelled. He remembered this from when he was very small: from the fear of certain teachers at Växjö Cathedral School to his years at the university in Lund. Without explanation, these stomach cramps had almost entirely vanished during his time in the desert. But now that he was approaching Lund the pain and cramping were coming back. Daniel sat next to the cart driver and a few times was allowed to hold the reins. Sometimes he ran alongside the cart, sometimes in front of the horses. Bengler realised that something decisive had happened to Daniel since he had skipped in the back courtyard in Simrishamn.

He still didn’t speak, but now he had a smile on his face, a smile that came from very far away, and Bengler believed that he would understand soon enough what sort of miracle had played out in that back courtyard. Even if there was a rational explanation, if Daniel was simply happy to meet some children his own age, Bengler suspected that the boy’s reaction was based on something alien. Something which he did not as yet understand.

Just before they reached Lund it began to rain. A heavy thunderstorm was passing through. They stopped at a dilapidated inn and took shelter from the weather. People gaped at Daniel, as usual, but he didn’t seem to notice. Not even when a drunk farmhand came up and stood there staring at him.

‘What the hell is this?’ he asked. ‘What the hell is this?’

The farmhand stank of dirt and aquavit. His eyes were red.

‘His name is Daniel,’ replied Bengler. ‘He’s a foreigner on a visit to our country.’

The farmhand kept staring.

‘What the hell is this?’ he repeated.

Daniel looked at him and then continued drinking the glass of water in front of him.

‘Is it some kind of animal?’

‘He’s a human being from a desert in Africa called the Kalahari.’

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘He’s on the way to Lund in my company.’

The farmhand kept on staring. Then he placed his rough hand very lightly and carefully on Daniel’s head.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen dwarfs and giant women and Siamese twins at fairs. But not this.’

‘He’s here so that we can look at him,’ said Bengler. ‘Human beings are made in different forms. But they’re all the same inside.’

An hour later, just before five in the afternoon, the thunderstorm moved on. They continued into the city. The farmer, who had let them ride along for free, dropped them off near the cathedral. Bengler had no more than a few copper coins in his pocket. He had left his baggage in Simrishamn as a guarantee that he would return and pay the bill. He took Daniel with him into the grove of trees by the cathedral. Since the ground was wet he spread out his coat for them to sit on.

‘What we need now is money,’ he said to Daniel. ‘The first thing we need is money.’

Daniel listened. He seemed preoccupied, but Bengler suspected that he must have begun to understand a few words.

‘Before I travelled to the desert I learned many things from a professor of botany named Alfred Herrnander,’ he went on. ‘He was a good man, an old man. I’m considering asking him for a loan. We can only hope that he’s still alive.’

Bengler had visited Herrnander once at his home north of the cathedral. They went there now. People passing by stopped and turned round.

‘Everyone who sees you will remember you,’ Bengler said. ‘They will tell their families tonight about what they saw. You’re already famous. Merely by walking down the street you’ve become a well-known person. You will be the object of curiosity, suspicion and, unfortunately, also some ill will. People are afraid of what’s foreign to them. And you are foreign, Daniel.’

They stopped outside the low grey house. When the door was opened by a serving woman with a limp, Bengler prayed that Herrnander was still alive.

He was.

But the year before he had had a stroke, the serving woman told him.

‘He’s not seeing visitors. He just lies there drumming his fingers on the blankets.’

‘Does he grind his jaws?’ Bengler asked.

The serving woman shook her head.

‘Why should he do that?’

‘I don’t know. It was only a question. But please go in and tell him that Hans Bengler is out here on the street. In his company he has a boy from the San people, nomads who live in the Kalahari Desert.’

‘Am I supposed to remember all that? All those strange words?’

‘Please try.’

‘Wait just a minute.’

She closed the door. Daniel jumped. Bengler thought that a door being slammed might remind him of a gunshot.

Then she was back with a pen and paper. Bengler wrote everything down. She did not invite them in.

‘The boy has oversensitive ears,’ said Bengler. ‘I would appreciate it if you would not slam the door so hard when you close it.’

They waited. By the time the door opened again, Bengler had begun to lose hope.

‘He will see you. But he can’t speak; with great effort he can write a few words on a slate.’

‘If he can listen that will be sufficient.’

Herrnander lay on a sofa of dark red plush in his study. The curtains were drawn and the room was low-ceilinged, cramped and stuffy. There were bookshelves up to the ceiling, full of etchings and manuscripts. Herrnander looked like a bird under the covers. On a table next to the sofa stood water and a brown bottle of medicine. It took a while before he noticed that they had come into the room. He slowly turned his head; his eyes scanned Bengler’s face and then stopped at Daniel’s. The serving woman who had followed them into the room stood guard by the door. Bengler made an effort to be firm and motioned for her to leave, which she reluctantly did. But she left the door ajar, so Bengler went and closed it. Then he stuffed his handkerchief in the keyhole and returned to the sofa. In order not to tire Herrnander, he summed up his journey in as few words as possible. The whole time Herrnander was gazing at Daniel’s face.

How could he convince Herrnander that it would be a good idea to give him a temporary loan so that he could get on with reporting his insect finds? He would write a scholarly article about the beetle and he would dedicate it to his mentor and teacher. But in order to be able to do this, he needed a small loan. A loan that could equally be regarded as an investment in the progress of science. Of course the loan would be paid back. Papers would be drawn up, signatures notarised. Everything would be done properly. He really needed this loan. And besides, there was the boy to consider. He had a person with him from a distant land: a person who was his responsibility, a celebrity to display.

When Bengler finished speaking his piece there was a long silence. He wondered whether Herrnander had understood anything he had said. Carefully he repeated the words: small loan. No great amount. For science and the boy.

One of Herrnander’s hands dropped to the edge of the sofa. Bengler thought it was a gesture of great weariness. But then he saw that a finger was beckoning. Herrnander was pointing at a portfolio that lay on the floor. Bengler lifted it up. With infinitely slow movements Herrnander opened it and pulled out a wad of notes. When Bengler asked if the money was for him, Herrnander nodded. Bengler started talking again about the importance of written agreements and signatures, but Herrnander struck the portfolio so that it fell to the floor. Bengler could see his irritation. He didn’t want any papers drawn up and signed. Next to the pillow he had his slate. He pulled it over and slowly scrawled one word. Bengler read it. Why. Nothing more. No question mark, just the single word why. Bengler was sure that the question had nothing to do with the money. This why was about Daniel. Bengler told him briefly what had happened before he found Daniel in Andersson’s pen. But Herrnander shook his head impatiently. His ‘why’ was still unanswered.

He wonders why I brought him here, Bengler thought. There was no other explanation. He told him about the need to show mercy, the simple Christian message not to refuse a fellow human being who was in trouble. But these words seemed to annoy Herrnander even more. Bengler abandoned the Christian argument and shifted to science. He wanted to make a study of Daniel and at the same time observe how Swedes reacted to their meeting with this foreigner.

Herrnander groaned. Slowly he crossed out the word why and replaced it with another one. Bengler read it: crazy. When he started to speak again Herrnander closed his eyes.

The conversation was over. Bengler felt insulted. What entitled this old man, with one foot in the grave, to criticise him? He stuffed the money in his pocket, took the handkerchief out of the keyhole and opened the door.

The serving woman came towards them from an adjacent room.

‘You stayed far too long,’ she said impatiently. ‘Now he’ll be restless all night.’

‘I promise we won’t come back,’ was Bengler’s friendly reply. ‘We have completed our business.’

When they were out on the street Bengler took a deep breath and looked at Daniel.

‘Now we have the most important thing a person can have,’ he said. ‘Capital. You don’t know what that is. But one day you’ll understand.’

Daniel could see that Bengler was calmer now. His eyes no longer flicked back and forth.

He stroked Daniel’s hair.

‘Tonight we’re going to live the way we deserve. We’ll eat an excellent dinner. And we’ll stay at the Grand Hotel.’

He stretched out his arm to point in the direction they were headed.

‘I knew it the whole time,’ he said and laughed. ‘I’m born to be a commander. Even if my army consists only of you.’

Daniel didn’t understand the words. But he felt that the most important thing was that the man walking in front of him no longer seemed worried.

Chapter 9

They took a corner room on the third floor. The man in the lobby had regarded Daniel with displeasure, but he hadn’t asked any questions. The room had thick curtains and smelled strongly of tobacco smoke. Daniel recoiled when he stepped over the threshold. Bengler thought it felt like stepping into a musty crypt. He was secretly ashamed that Daniel would have to sleep in this heavy smoke. He pulled back the curtains and opened the window. Daniel came over and stood next to him. He was afraid when he saw how high above the ground they were. Bengler realised that for Daniel there was probably no connection between the stairs they had climbed and how high the room was: for Daniel a staircase was a hill going up, not something that left the ground far below them.

‘Tonight we shall sleep here,’ Bengler explained.

He pointed at the bed. Daniel went over to it and lay down.

‘Not yet,’ Bengler said. ‘First I have to give you a wash. Then we’ll go down to the dining room and eat dinner.’

Bengler gestured to Daniel to get undressed. He took off his clothes too and hung up the worn suit on a clothes hanger. Daniel was very thin. Just below his right nipple he had a scar that shone white against his black skin. Bengler looked at his member. It was still undeveloped, but very long. On an impulse he couldn’t resist, he touched it. Daniel at once did the same to him and Bengler gave a start. Daniel gave him a worried look. Bengler thought it was like having a puppy for a companion. He poured water into the washbasin and told Daniel to sit down on the bed and watch how a person washed properly. Bengler placed a towel on the floor and washed himself carefully. He reminded himself of how he had been washed as a child and concluded by scrubbing his buttocks with a brush. Daniel watched him intently. Bengler felt like a heavy and shapeless animal standing naked in front of the basin. When he had dried himself he rang a bell. It took a few minutes before there was a knock on the door. A girl in a starched apron stood there and curtsied. She gave a start when she saw Daniel and quickly looked away. Bengler gave her the empty water pitcher and asked for some more hot water. He wrapped Daniel in the bedspread. When the girl came back with the hot water he gave Daniel the brush and sat down on the edge of the bed. Daniel washed himself. To Bengler’s astonishment the boy had memorised in detail how he had washed himself. First the right leg, then the left arm, armpit, belly and then the left leg. Daniel repeated the movements.

‘You learn very fast,’ said Bengler. ‘You’ve already mastered the art of staying clean.’

When they had dressed they went downstairs to the dining room. It hadn’t changed since the last time Bengler was there. The kerosene lamps shone, on the tables stood candelabra, and Bengler felt a sense of anticipation: would there be anyone here he knew? They were greeted at the door by the maître d’, who regarded Daniel with an astonished expression. He had a Danish accent. Bengler looked around the dining room. On this autumn evening the patrons were sparse: lone bachelors hunched over their bottles of arrack punch; a few small groups. Bengler asked for a window table. As they walked between the tables all conversation stopped. Bengler suddenly felt that he ought to tap a glass and give a brief speech about his trip through the Kalahari Desert, but he refrained. They sat down at the table.

‘He’s short,’ said Bengler. ‘Give him a cushion to sit on.’

The maître d’ bowed and motioned for a waiter. Bengler didn’t recognise him and wondered where all the waiters who were there before had gone. After all, he had only been away for a little over a year. Daniel was given a velvet cushion to sit on. Bengler studied the menu, shocked at how much the prices had gone up, and then ordered pork chops, wine, water for Daniel and orange mousse for dessert.

‘Would the gentlemen care for an aperitif?’

The waiter was old and rheumatic and had bad breath.

‘A shot and a beer,’ replied Bengler. ‘The boy won’t have anything.’

When Bengler had received his shot of aquavit and tossed it back, he at once ordered another. The liquor warmed him and inspired a restless need to get seriously drunk. Daniel sat motionless across the table and followed him with his eyes. Bengler raised his glass and said ‘Skål’ to him.

At that moment he noticed that a man had got up from a table next to the wall and was on his way over to them. As he approached, Bengler saw that it was an old perpetual student they called the Loop. He had been in Lund as long as Bengler had attended the university. Once in the late 1860s he had tried to hang himself outside the cathedral. But the rope, or maybe it was the branch, had broken and he survived. One of his cervical vertebrae had been damaged, which crooked his head rigidly to the left, as if his soul had been given a list that could never be righted. He stopped at their table. Bengler could see that he was extremely drunk. The Loop owed everyone money. When he arrived in Lund from Halmstad in the late 1840s, rumour had it that he was living on an inheritance. The first few years he had attended lectures in the theological faculty, but something had happened that led to the tree and the broken branch. It was intimated that it was the usual matter, an unhappy love affair. But no one knew with certainty. Since that day, the Loop had lived in a wretched garret on the outskirts of Lund. He broke off his studies and didn’t read anything any more, not even the newspapers. He was always borrowing money, could tell a good story from time to time, but for the most part sat hunched over his glass and his bottles and held mumbling conversations with himself. Sometimes he would wave his arms about as if he were bothered by insects, and then sit in silence until the last patron was thrown out. Now he was standing by their table.

‘There’s been talk of an expedition to a faraway desert,’ he said. ‘And one never expected to see the explorer return. Now here he sits as though nothing had happened. He has a black creature sitting across the table. A boy who looks like a shadow.’

‘His name is Daniel,’ replied Bengler. ‘We’re only passing through.’

‘So one’s studies shall not be resumed?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t wish to intrude,’ the Loop went on. ‘But the explorer, whose name has unfortunately slipped my mind, might possibly see his way clear to a small loan of a tenner.’

Bengler felt in his pocket and pulled out two ten-kronor notes. It was too much but the Loop had recognised him. The notes vanished in the Loop’s hand, though he didn’t bother to see how much he had got. Nor did he bother to say thank you.

‘Everything is the same here,’ he said. ‘Maître d’s come and go, as do the waiters. The students grow younger and younger, the weather worse and worse, and the knowledge that is taught is more and more difficult to respect.’

He expected no reply so turned and made his way back to his table.

By the time the orange mousse was set on the table Bengler was quite tipsy. He waved the maître d’ over.

‘Is it possible that the hotel could provide someone to watch the boy for a while?’ He pointed at Daniel. ‘I’m thinking of spending a few hours in the smoking room. It’s not a suitable environment for a child.’

The maître d’ promised to enquire at the front desk. Daniel had finished all his food. During the long passage from Cape Town, Bengler had taught him to use a knife and fork. He could see that Daniel had to make an effort to do as he had been taught, but he didn’t spill anything or cram the food into his mouth. The maître d’ returned.

‘They think it would be possible to have one of the chambermaids watch him.’

Bengler paid the bill and stood up. He took a step sideways. Daniel smiled. He thinks I’m playing, thought Bengler. An intoxicated person is someone who’s playing, nothing more. They left the dining room. The Loop had disappeared. Conversations stopped again as they passed various tables. Once more Bengler got the feeling that he ought to say something. But what would he say? What could he actually explain? Or did he somehow feel a need to excuse himself for breaking an invisible rule of etiquette by bringing a black boy into a public dining room?

It turned out that the girl who was sent to look after Daniel was the same girl who had brought the hot water earlier.

‘All you have to do is stay here,’ said Bengler. ‘You don’t have to talk or play with him. Just stay here. What’s your name?’

‘Charlotta.’

‘Just see that he doesn’t open the window,’ Bengler went on. ‘Or go out of the door. I’ll be down in the smoking room.’

Daniel seemed to understand what he said. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Bengler.

The room beyond the dining room was just as he remembered it. The tobacco smoke that hovered like a motionless fog, the sweet smell of arrack punch, the dim light from the kerosene lamps. He stood in the doorway and looked around. It was as if he recognised all the faces even though the people there were strangers to him. A chair right next to one of the windows was free. He went over to it. The thought of punch didn’t appeal to him so he ordered cognac. For the first time in ages he felt free. Daniel was a burden. He had taken it on himself, but still the boy was a burden. Had he ever thought about what a responsibility he had shouldered? The cognac muddled his thoughts. All he knew was that he had to take Daniel with him to Hovmantorp. Then he would present his desert finds and, based on that, attempt to find a way to make a living. What that would involve he had no idea. He could travel around and give lectures. But who would be interested in insects? He ordered another glass of cognac. In one of the darkest corners of the room two women sat drinking with some students. Suddenly he saw Matilda before him. A powerful desire filled him, now he had returned. Matilda must be nearby, if she was still alive, if she hadn’t left for Denmark or Hamburg. One of the women on the sofa got up. She was not beautiful; her face was ravaged. She disappeared through the draperies. Bengler followed her. She was standing in front of a mirror and straightening her hat.

She smiled when he stopped next to her. For sale, he thought. She wasn’t in Lund when I left. Now she’s here, she’s come from somewhere and she’s for sale. The same way Matilda had come from Landskrona after her father violated her.

‘I’m looking for a woman,’ said Bengler.

She smiled but with her lips pressed together. Bengler knew what that meant: she had bad teeth. Or perhaps she had syphilis, which could be seen on the tongue.

‘I’m already engaged,’ she said. ‘But some other evening. Gentlemen are so unpredictable. The one sitting in there wants to marry me. But what he’ll want to do tomorrow, nobody knows.’

‘Her name is Matilda,’ said Bengler. ‘Matilda Andersson. She used to keep me company. Then I left on a long voyage. Now I’ve come back.’

The woman at the mirror continued straightening her hat. Bengler looked at her breasts under the tight-fitting blouse. He could feel his excitement growing.

‘Matilda is a common name. Just as common as mine, Carolina. Describe her for me.’

Bengler didn’t know what to say. He could describe her naked body, the shape of her breasts and thighs, but how had she dressed? He tried to remember. But he saw her only without clothes.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘She had blue eyes, brown hair. Maybe it was naturally curly, maybe she had it curled. She smelled sour.’

The woman was finished with her hat. She moved close to him.

‘What do I smell like?’

‘Like liquorice root.’

‘Forget her. Tomorrow I can keep you company.’

She gave his face a quick caress. He couldn’t help grabbing her breast. She laughed, twisted away and then vanished back through the draperies. Bengler walked through the lobby and out in to the street. It was warmer now after the downpour.

Somewhere he heard a horse whinnying. He looked up at the corner room where Daniel had probably fallen asleep by now. The desire for a woman was very strong. He thought about Benikkolua. Why couldn’t he have taken her along as well as Daniel? The thought of the woman in front of the mirror suddenly made him sick. In the cool autumn evening he began to hate this town. If it hadn’t been for the money he would never have come back. Matilda wasn’t even a memory, only a mirage, just like there in the desert. What had been was no more. Now it was only him and Daniel and the cognac, which made him feel like he was standing on the heaving deck of a ship again.

He went back inside, paid for his drinks, and heard the women laughing in the dark when he left through the draperies. I’m a person who’s doing a lot of different things for the last time, he thought. I will never come back to this room.

When he came upstairs to the corner room the chambermaid was asleep in a chair. Daniel was also sleeping. The girl jumped when Bengler touched her shoulder. Once more he felt desire flare up. How old could she be? Sixteen or seventeen, hardly more. She was very pale.

‘I’ll pay you,’ he said. ‘Did he go over to the window?’

‘He sat on the edge of the bed playing with his fingers.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Then he played with his feet.’

‘And then?’

‘Then he went to bed. He never looked at me.’

‘He seldom looks at people,’ said Bengler. ‘On the other hand, he does sometimes look straight through people who cross his path.’

Bengler had taken out a riksdaler coin. That was too much. Without really wanting to, he took a note out of his pocket.

‘There will be more money to be made,’ he said. ‘If you’re nice to me.’

She understood and jumped up. She ought to slap me, Bengler thought. Instead she blushed.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to pay me for this. I didn’t do anything. Just sat here.’

Bengler grabbed her arm. She tensed up.

‘I have to be careful,’ he said.

She started to cry. Shame crashed furiously over Bengler. What in hell am I doing? he thought. I’m trying to buy this girl who doesn’t even know what love is, knows nothing besides cleaning, curtsying and being pleasant.

‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ he muttered. ‘Take the coin.’

But the girl fled and he was left standing with the coin in his hand. His shame was raging. He went over to the window and looked down at the street. The students were leaving with their women. He watched the woman with the hat and thought: I have to get out of here. His old life was gone. He had left it behind in the desert. Now he had his insects and Daniel.

He undressed and sat down in the chair where the chambermaid had been sitting. Without inviting it, the feeling of arousal returned. Matilda was gone, just like Benikkolua. Only the woman with her lips pressed together was left. Daniel was asleep. He sat down at the desk. The kerosene lamp burned with a low flame. He turned it up and then took out ‘Daniel’s Book’. But the words wouldn’t come. Instead he drew something, and at first he didn’t know what it was. Then he realised that he was trying to depict the wagon and the oxen when the wheel broke and he had been forced to take charge. He drew poorly; the wheel was oval, the wagon sunken in, the oxen looked like sway-backed cows and the ox-drivers only thin lines. He closed the book, turned off the lamp and crept into bed next to Daniel. In the morning we have to be off, he thought. The money I have will get us to Hovmantorp and then on to Stockholm. Beyond that I can’t imagine what will happen.

He turned his head and looked at Daniel lying curled up with his back to him. His breathing was very calm. Bengler carefully pressed two fingers to his carotid artery and counted silently to himself.

Fifty-one. Daniel’s pulse was very regular. And he still wasn’t in the deepest sleep: then his pulse would be between forty-five and fifty.

Bengler closed his eyes. The woman who was inside him pressed her lips together. Slowly he returned to the desert. The sun burned in his dreams.

Daniel lay wide awake at his side. When he was sure that Bengler was asleep he got up and carefully opened the notebook lying next to the kerosene lamp. The drawing depicted nothing. It was like an unfinished petroglyph on a rock wall.