Daniel (2 page)

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.

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?