Open Grave

Seventeen

The notes from Africa no longer interested him. He had long intended to edit the scattered paragraphs into a coherent text. Obviously a lot would have to be deleted, but there was enough that held up to closer inspection.

Now he didn’t know. Small observations of nature by a white man in a black country, what would that be good for? Miss Elly would have been immensely amused, he smiled at the memory of her merciless laughter. He read a couple of sentences: “I know nothing about fireflies. That worries me.” Miss Elly would have choked.

No, I’ll throw the piles of papers in the garbage can, he decided, but changed his mind at the same moment. What if his mother had thought the same way and actually thrown away her diaries? Then he would be suspended in ignorance of who she really was, and above all he would never have gotten an answer to questions he had wondered about ever since childhood. Perhaps the answers came a bit late, but he experienced a great warmth at the sight of his mother’s primitive scribbling.

But on the other hand, he had no children who would read and understand in retrospect. They never had any children. That was why Miss Elly died, there was no other explanation. Her shame at being a barren cow was too great. Her despair hollowed her out until only a dry skin remained. She weighed nothing when she passed away. He carried her casket alone on one shoulder.

So who would read his notes? He had no ambition to stand out as intelligent, because he had never seen himself that way. He was good at a number of things, he could track, haul wood, imitate bird calls, likewise lay an acid-soil bed and a whole lot more. None of this was especially remarkable. The birds sang better than he did. Millions of people in Africa could track, but he had been given a talent that not many white people had, Miss Elly thought. In that area she was impressed by his skills. Otherwise his experiences could be sorted under the “everyday” category.

He harbored no ambitions to be an author either. He had never read that much; during the years in Africa there had simply been a lack of books. At his uncle’s in Windhoek there were only German novels of miserable quality and pornography of even lower quality. Then, in the northern provinces, he never experienced any need for books.

If he had at least been agitated when he jotted down his lines, then perhaps it would be instructive or at least readable for a wider audience. Strangely enough, though, he thought in retrospect, the notes were chemically free from comments about what was happening in the country. Not even when the resistance struggle intensified and the armed groups went past, sometimes only gangs of boys from the high plateaus equipped with a few automatic rifles, did it leave any traces in his writing. He had not hesitated a moment about where his sympathies were; many times he had ended up in arguments with other whites, not least the Haller family in the capital, but none of this appeared in his writings, not a single expression of anger.

In his texts animals and nature dominated, skies, stars and desert sand, rain that fell or was absent, mooing, bellowing, and shrieks in the night, sunrises so beautiful that he wept with gratitude.

A few lines about Miss Elly. If I had written more about her and love anyway, he thought, I could have filled however many pages. No, instead I wrote about fireflies. No wonder she laughed.

The conclusion was that what was most interesting to others, most universally applicable or exciting in a more conventional sense, was lacking.

But perhaps, he concluded his train of thought, perhaps in the future could there be a person, in Sweden or in Namibia, who would find the text interesting? The problem was how this person would get hold of his notes. That was an insurmountable problem. When he died the text would die with him.

He should let chance decide! As part of his estate, his typed-out African meditations would be neatly collected. Those to whom the task fell of cleaning up after him would have to decide. Either the papers would end up in a black garbage bag along with old vouchers, warranties for the toaster, and everything else he had collected, or else the finder would sit down and start browsing, perhaps enticed by the exotic photo on the front page depicting Miss Elly sitting on the skull of a hippopotamus, and after a couple of pages would say to his assistant, “This is really interesting.” Then the other person, tired of the first person’s passivity, would encourage him to take the papers home and continue reading there.

That is what would happen when the text started to have a life of its own. What would happen then no one could know. The number of possibilities made him dizzy.

He laughed, stirred a little absentmindedly the bowl of pasta he was cooking, and thought about the police officers he had met earlier in the day. The man, Nilsson he had introduced himself as, stood out as a cheerful fellow. Or was he just pretending? No, Karsten thought to himself, he seemed genuinely pleasant, open and talkative. But the woman who came up later looked like seven years of famine.

She had inspected him suspiciously. Perhaps she despised people who dug? Or else she was angry at her colleague, thought that he was wasting time, and then let her displeasure spill over on him.

What surprised Karsten was the information that new threats had been made against the professor. What the threats consisted of Nilsson would not say, other than that it concerned something that was placed by the mailbox. No, Karsten had not seen anything, he was fully occupied with excavating and could not possibly perceive what was happening in the neighboring yards, especially on the other side of the houses. The policeman seemed content with that.

It was obvious that the professor was being attacked from several directions. The morning’s article in the newspaper spoke for itself. The academic feuding was a fact, and clearly not only in Sweden. It serves him right, thought Karsten contentedly, taking the pot from the stove and pouring the pasta into the colander, rinsing it with cold water, adding a little butter, and tilting it up onto the plate.

But who had set something by the gate, and what? You might think it was a bomb, the way the police were acting.

The meat sauce, bought ready-made, was not especially good, but he still shoveled it in with good appetite. Perhaps the associate professor knew more? He decided to look him up. There was a witch alder waiting for him, after all.

He picked up his workbook, opened to a new page, and noted how many hours he had put in at Lundquist’s, how many kilometers he drove during the day and how much he had spent on plants. Everything had to be noted for later accounting, but also for his own sake.

There was a certain joy in this, browsing back in the workbooks, recalling things large and small, plantings or stone paving that he was especially pleased with, which customers had been grateful, or for that matter who had complained. The latter were, however, clearly in the minority.

It struck him that this was as good a diary as any. Since his return to Sweden he had filled a combined thirty-eight workbooks. All were lined up on the bookshelf.

He was a lonely man, it had gradually occurred to him. Not because he thought about himself and his own situation that much but because he observed other people. He saw how they sought each other out, clumped together, terrified to have dinner at a restaurant on their own or sit on a park bench down in the City Garden and philosophize, read a book or simply casually watch people passing by. Not to mention going to a concert or a play alone. Everyone tried to look as if they were waiting for an acquaintance, looking at their watches, taking out their cell phones, conversing with someone or at least pretending to converse.

That was foreign to him. He was usually most content being by himself. Recently, however, a new type of worry had come over him, perhaps triggered by his mother’s death. He became dazed by the new thought that the loner’s existence was in opposition to the very idea of life, the African thought and attitude to life that he was so familiar with, where loneliness was considered an illness.

For it occurred to him, late in life it might seem, that everything he did was measured not only against his own conceptions but also other people’s dreams and needs. Of course your own satisfaction counted for a lot, but still it was a little sad now: Lundquist was out of town, he had no one to talk with, show his progress to. Even if most of his customers were ignorant, and downright thankful not to have to think and decide on something, they were still polite, pretending to be interested or impressed by the progress in their gardens.

Now he was groping along, in principle sure of his business, he knew every species and its characteristics and needs, but subjected to the vacuum of loneliness he was listless and perplexed. The notes of the workbook became hours and kronor, nothing more.

He was a solitary person who erected monuments that people barely noticed.

The dishes were soon done and there were hours until it was time to go to bed. He sat down in the sparsely furnished living room and continued thinking. He was not particularly good at it, he was a man of action, but the recent years’ practice in brooding was starting to produce results. He was getting ever more persistent and capable. Just so I don’t get like Father, he thought, who could sit for hours staring into space.

Karsten understood early on that it was the war that was raging in his father. The eighth of May 1945 meant peace but not the end of the war. He was marching as long as he lived inside himself the long way from East Prussia to Stralsund, over and over again.

On lampposts and provisional gallows to the right the “traitors” were hanging and to the left the “Nazi swine” were swaying in the wind. Their tongues were swollen. Often they had pissed and shit on themselves. Birds were sitting on their shoulders. Flies buzzed. At their feet were dogs.

Between them marched columns of the destitute, hungry, terrified, stinking, apathetic, wounded, dying. Westward. Karsten was in this parade of human wreckage too, secured to his father’s body with a belt from a German soldier. Karsten still had the belt with the eagle.

He remembered nothing himself, he was an infant. What was he fed on? A mystery. “On love,” said his father, who then burst into tears; Karsten saw how he struggled to hold it back. He hugged Karsten, then age fourteen, so hard it hurt. He still felt that grip, almost fifty years later.

Karsten Haller smiled. What strength, he thought. What love that surrounded him. The gratitude of his parents’ energy and consideration shot up like laughter.

He understood that he had turned his thoughts around. It was here that the skill showed itself. Only a couple of years ago it would have gone in the other direction, right toward the abyss. Nowadays he could stop and reset his course. The happy memories took over.

He stood up, went over to the window. On the other side of the street was a woman who usually had dinner at this time. She was perhaps in her forties, had moved in a year ago. Karsten thought she was divorced. No children were ever seen. Her kitchen table was lit up by a red lamp, shaped like a funnel. It was like a painting: the gentle light, the woman with small, deliberate movements, she always ate slowly, always alone, sometimes she browsed in a magazine.

He observed her awhile, let his eyes rest. It was like at Okanga, the southern water hole, where he also used to stand concealed for a half hour or so and study the animals that came to drink.