Daniel

Epilogue Kalahari Desert, March 1995

On the road between Francistown in Botswana and Windhoek in Namibia, he spent the night at a hotel in Ghanzi. The village consisted of a collection of wind-tormented houses that lay strewn in the middle of the desert. The hotel was full of sand. Even though the menu at the restaurant offered a great variety of dishes, they consisted mostly of sand. It crunched between his teeth even when he drank water. In the hotel’s desolate bar two men sat concluding a deal. They were taking their time and there were frequent long silences before they continued the conversation. In the desert there was no reason to hurry. Since there were no other guests in the bar and the barman had disappeared, he couldn’t avoid hearing what they were talking about. One of them had got his lorry stuck just past the Namibian border and was now trying to sell both the vehicle and the load, which apparently included bicycle tyres and various wares, such as children’s clothing, stockings and a carton of peaked caps that the man had acquired at a bargain price. The negotiations proceeded slowly, and he didn’t stay long enough to hear whether the two men reached an agreement or not.

Just before dark he took a walk along the only street. Everywhere the desert was present. He went into a shop, mostly to see what there was to buy. The woman behind the counter, who was black and quite young, asked him at once whether he would marry her and take her away. He had a strong feeling that she was serious, and he quickly left the shop.

In the evening, after eating eggs, potatoes, vegetables and sand, he lay awake in his hotel room fighting with the mosquitoes. The desert that surrounded him roared in the darkness, as if he were actually on an island in the middle of an endless sea.

When he awoke in the morning he was covered with mosquito bites. He lay in bed and counted the days. If he had been infected with malaria during the night, it would take about a fortnight before the illness broke out. By then, if everything went as planned, he would already be far away from the desert.

He continued his journey towards the Namibian border. He had been warned that the road was very poor, sometimes almost non-existent, but the jeep with its four-wheel drive and powerful engine drove him on. He wondered when he would pass the lorry that should be out there somewhere, like a shipwrecked boat in the sea of sand.

Before he got that far he stopped to take a piss. The desert was flat, not like the desert he had seen in pictures, with dunes that rose up in soft ridges, hiding all the sand that lay beyond them. Here there were no hills. The sand was grey, and there were a few isolated low bushes. At the horizon, heaven and earth met in a colourless mist.

When he had buttoned up his flies and turned round to get behind the wheel again, he discovered a group of people walking towards him across the desert. They moved very quickly in single file, and it took a while before he was quite sure that he was seeing people and not animals. He went back to the jeep and leaned against it so that the driver’s side gave him shade. He squinted and counted the people approaching. He came up with the number thirty-one.

The first to reach him was a skinny old man who had grey hair and bow legs. The man regarded him with inquisitive eyes.

‘I know how to speak English,’ he said.

He was surprised. He had been told that the nomads in the desert, the Bushmen, didn’t speak any language but their own, which comprised the strange clicking sounds that were almost impossible for others to master.

The jeep was now surrounded by the nomads. All of them gave him friendly looks, and not even the little children seemed afraid of him. Suddenly he realised that he now had an opportunity that might never come again. It was impossible to make an appointment with a nomad. One could never specify a time with a group belonging to the San people. But here he had happened to meet one of these groups, and there was even a man who spoke English.

He asked the old man whether they had time to stop for a while and let him tell them a story. The man turned to the others and began speaking the language with the clicking sounds. They all seemed quite intrigued that someone wanted to tell them a story. They sat down in the sand, and even though it was quite hot, none of them wanted to sit in the shade next to the jeep.

Then he told the story of a boy who was given the name Daniel and who had come to Sweden about 120 years before. The old man translated his English and he noticed that the people grew very quiet as they sat before him in the sand. It was a quietness that came from within, a concentration that he had never experienced. He told them everything he knew, all the details he had managed to find out about the boy who now lay buried in a churchyard in the southern part of the faraway land called Sweden. He also told them that he was now making the long journey to Windhoek to search through the old German archives, which were now the National Archives of Namibia, to see whether he could find any documents about the people who had taken the boy named Daniel to Sweden.

When he had finished telling the story, he handed the old man the photograph, taken in the photography studio in Lund, that he had managed to find. It had been in the possession of the relatives of Hans Bengler, who were very reluctant to part with it. He had never been able to understand their reluctance, or perhaps it was anguish. The story of Daniel seemed enveloped in a shameful silence.

Now the photograph was passed among the people in the sand. He had a feeling that what was playing out before him was a religious rite.

As he handed back the photograph, the old man began to speak. He searched a long time for the words, as if it was important to him that everything he said was correct.

The old man thanked him. For coming the long distance in the jeep from the land whose name he couldn’t pronounce and restoring Daniel’s spirit to the desert, to the place where he should have lived and also been buried.

When the man stopped a woman stood up. She was carrying a tiny baby on her back and she came and stood in front of him.

‘Her name is Be,’ said the old man.

He looked into her eyes and thought that Daniel’s mother might have looked just like her. He also knew that from this moment on she would always think that she was the mother of that boy, the boy who lay buried so far away.

Afterwards they got up and walked away. Soon he could hardly see them, only a drawn-out line of black dots in the dazzling sunlight.

In the archives in Windhoek he found no documents that could tell him anything more about Daniel and Hans Bengler, or about Wilhelm Andersson; nothing that he didn’t know already. On the other hand, he spent the whole day leafing through huge folders full of photographs that an English photographer named Frank Hodgson had taken during his travels in what was then called German South-West Africa in the 1870s, the period when Daniel had made his long journey to Sweden.

One of the photographs depicted a man, a woman and a boy. They were posed stiffly in front of the photographer’s camera. The boy stood in the foreground. He was much like Daniel, the way he looked in the photograph taken at the studio in Lund. He thought that they might have looked like this, Be and Kiko and Daniel, who at that time had an entirely different name — which no one would ever know.

Then he left the National Archives. The hot, dry wind outside the cool air-conditioned building library hit him like a wall.

Two days later he drove back the same way he had come. When he reached the spot where he had told his story, he stopped and got out of the car. In Windhoek he had bought a telescope. He looked through it, scanning the horizon, but the desert was empty. He couldn’t see any people anywhere. He didn’t dare wait too long, since he wanted to make it to Ghanzi before dark.

The desert stayed empty. He drove on. Just before sundown he arrived in Ghanzi.

Several years later he wrote this book, which has now come to an end.