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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
The best fiction from across the Nordic region, selected and introduced by Sjón - Iceland's internationally renowned writer The North: home of epic storytelling, birthplace of the saga, where stories of human survival have long been sculpted by the region's natural elements, from sheltering forests to islands lashed by unforgiving seas. This exquisite anthology, selected by Sjón and Ted Hodgkinson, collects fiction from across the Nordic region in all its thrilling diversity; storytelling that is often rooted in the world of folklore and fairytale, or sometimes stark realism, and typically served up with a dark and dry wit. Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic novelist and poet. He won the Nordic Council's Literature Prize (the Nordic countries' equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) for his novel The Blue Fox, and the novel From the Mouth of the Whale was shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His novel Moonstone - The Boy Who Never Was (2013) received every major literature prize in Iceland. Sjón's biggest work to date, the trilogy CoDex 1962, was published in its final form in autumn 2016 to great acclaim and will be published in English by Sceptre. He has published nine poetry collections, written four opera librettos and song lyrics for various artists. In 2001 he was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics in the film Dancer in the Dark. Sjón's novels have been published in thirty-five languages. Ted Hodgkinson is a broadcaster, editor, critic, writer and Senior Programmer for Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre, Europe's largest arts centre. Formerly online editor at Granta magazine of new writing, his essays, interviews and reviews have appeared across a range of publications and websites, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Literary Hub and the Independent. He is a former British Council literature programmer for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. He currently sits on the judging panel of the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award for the best second novel and the selection panel for the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Fellowship. He has previously judged the BBC National Short Story Award, the British Book Awards and the Costa Book Awards.
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Contents
Introduction
TED HODGKINSON AND SJÓN
THE NORTH CONJURES epic storytelling. It is the birthplace of the saga, where stories of human survival have long been sculpted by the region’s raw elements, as in turn they have shaped its varied landscapes, from sheltering forests to islands lashed by unforgiving seas. The ancestry of this tradition can be found in many-volumed novels that detail struggles against the headwinds of the modern-day elements, and also in the vicissitudes of Nordic noir, which keep us in suspense, season after season. More than recounting feats of endurance, the storytelling of the region is also alive to the possibilities of human transformation, rooted in the metaphysical world of folklore and fairy tale. The contemporary Nordic short story is a crucible in which these properties are fused together, capturing a quest for survival while prising open, in the space of just a few pages, potential for radical change. These are timely qualities in a world on the brink, in which we need to find ways of reimagining our relationship to our natural surroundings, ourselves and each other.
Sjón is an author uniquely attuned to these storytelling frequencies, who in his own writing across many forms creates historical epics in miniature, focusing on moments of profound transformation, through an often surreal lens. A priest hunts a mysterious blue fox across the stark winter-scape of nineteenth-century Iceland. Or in his most recent novel, a young boy captivated by cinema awakens to his true identity as Spanish flu ravages Reykjavík in 1918. Sjón has brought his own distinctive vision to this first ever selection of short stories from the Nordic region in English, published to coincide with the Southbank Centre’s Nordic Matters series and the London Literature Festival. Our selection encompasses writers from across generations of each literary culture, to present a prismatic perspective of each place, refracting a broad range of literary styles and human experience. The overall balance of genders reflects a region which has produced some of the finest writers of either gender at work today, though it’s also especially notable that many of those from the younger generation are women breathing fresh life into the literature of their homelands, including Dorthe Nors, Linda Boström Knausgaard and Niviaq Korneliussen. While in recent years many Nordic novelists have found their way into English translation, relatively few of those writers who have focused on the short story have made that same journey—this anthology aims to help close those gaps and create openings into a revelatory world of storytelling.
To introduce the selection, I begin by asking my co-editor Sjón what he sees as the cultural and literary connections between the eight distinctive Nordic lands of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Faroe Islands, Åland Islands, Greenland and his native Iceland.
*
Sjón, the Nordic region covers a vast and varied terrain, both geographically and culturally. What are the things which bind it together? What are the elements that make up a Nordic identity? And after editing this anthology, what have you discovered about the literary links between the writers of the North?
The Nordic identity question is one Nordic authors are repeatedly asked in interviews or on the panels of literary festivals; especially abroad and especially in the context of the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. Their usual reaction to it is to be annoyed at hearing it again, before they answer that there is no common identity; that the literatures of each country have developed in their own specific ways; and so on. But as I take it, the question is really not about our own contemporary literary output but the deeper currents that run under the whole social make-up of the North. So I always try to answer it positively.
The fact that we share history, both cultural and political, that goes back more than a millennium means our societies—which in the beginning seem to have all been Germanic and heathen, and speaking variants of Old Norse—have been introduced to great historical changes at the same time and had to react to them from that common ground. So the region’s movement from the Norse religions to Catholicism, from Catholicism to the Protestant Reformation, from the Reformation to Enlightenment via the Renaissance, from monarchy to democracy and then on to twentieth-century trends in ideologies, art movements and empowerment of social groups, could therefore be seen as one, making us a single culture with regional variations.
The long shared political history is, of course, also a story of wars, invasions, defeats, colonization and the fight for independence among those countries—and thereby of narratives about individuals and communities caught up in those events at the same time while in different parts of the North.
By editing this anthology with you, Ted, I have become even more sure than ever before of how deep the common Nordic roots lie and how consistent authors in the North are in collectively nurturing and feeding from them.
From Johan Bargum’s haunting story in which a father believes he is a dog, to Hassan Blasim’s fierce and funny tale of a tiger who is writing a crime novel and drives the 55 bus in Helsinki, to Dorthe Nors’s spooky story of a man with an injured ankle waiting by a deer stand as darkness falls, many of the stories here capture a moment of transformation, or characters caught on the threshold between worlds. Your writing is also deeply alive to the possibilities of transformation. What makes Nordic writers so imaginatively drawn to the metaphysical, or even the magical?
I think that within much of Nordic literature there are two main tendencies at play—the naturalist school and the folk tradition or diverse common-folk’s belief systems—and since the beginning of modernity one can see them used together or combined in different measures in most of the best short stories and novels from the region. The naturalists’ legacy of writing socially relevant stories—and their faith in the author’s power to be a voice of change by revealing society’s ills with literary means—is still there and responsible for the strong humanist foundation shared by the stories readers will find in this anthology. A part of that humanist worldview is respecting what folk stories have to offer as literature and as the means to understand the universe and man’s place in it. And, as you know, once you are there—in a forest of stories, on an island of too many tales, in a city of sorrowful rhymes—you are in a world where metamorphosis and transcending the borders of the “real” and the “true” are more than just possible, they are tools of survival in harsh natural surroundings or a failing community. Today this can be seen in narratives about changing identities or new sexualities.
Another strong factor in Nordic literature is the early input of the avant-garde in most of the countries—surrealist poetry and the modernist novel—which on the one hand has resulted in a relentless questioning of the realist method, and on the other in renewing the ways authors can use elements from folk culture in their writing. Add to all of this the influence of diverse strands of Protestant and radical political thinking on Nordic authors and you have a heady brew. I’ll stop here, but I am glad you mentioned Hassan Blasim as he and other authors who have come to our countries in the North from faraway places around the globe are already creating new challenges for Nordic literature and moving it forward with their own stories from abroad and within, with references to shape-shifters we couldn’t even dream of.
Why do the stories we tell matter in a world on the brink?
Even though our Nordic welfare states are today as modern/post-modern as they can possibly can be, the great works of twentieth-century Nordic literature makes us keenly aware that we are just a generation or two—maybe three, four, I tend to forget as I get older—away from life lived in hardship brought on by unjust and unforgiving societies. This is a literary and social heritage I don’t hesitate to insist no Nordic writer can escape from and which can be found at the root of all the stories in this anthology, even when it is not directly noticed; no matter if their authors are born sixty-one years apart, in 1929 like the Norwegian Kjell Askildsen or in 1990 like Niviaq Korneliussen from Greenland.
But what they also share, apart from this grounding in social awareness, is the need to tell a good story (melancholic, absurd or grim as it may be) with means both tested and newly invented. Because who has the patience to read a tale from small places at the edge of the globe or on the margins of communities if it isn’t told with wit—dark and dry, of course, we are Nordic—precision and restrained empathy for its characters?
The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat travels with diverse stories in its pockets and even in its linings. It comes to its readers from the affluent North that tops every global survey of happiness and equality, but on closer inspection it will reveal itself to be worn at the elbows, patched up here and there. In our present world of conflict and climate change, it offers what literature has always had to offer—the few moments of warmth that come from sharing a story, a chance for people to compare their fates, to discover their common humanity and to ask for stories in return.
SUNDAY
NAJA MARIE AIDT
IT WAS COMPLETELY STILL ON the terrace in front of the house where Iben was sitting on a bench with her back against the wall, enjoying watching the children bounce on the trampoline. She could hear Peter shouting something, making the children squeal with delight. It was such a beautiful day. The September sun crashed down from a cloudless sky. The cat snuck under the bench. They had all sat there eating breakfast a little while ago, and now Kamilla was inside doing the dishes with the girls. Iben closed her eyes and leaned her head back. She remembered a sad and pretty song that had always made her cry with joy when she was young. She whistled the opening lines to herself. Then someone was pulling on her sleeves. It was her son wanting to go down and throw stones into the pond at the far end of the yard. She got up and took him by the hand.
Mosquitoes swarmed over the water. She threw a stick in and told the boy that it was now sailing out into the wide world. But the boy replied that it would never come up from that mud-hole again. The girl bounced light as a feather up and down on the trampoline. Peter stood near them smoking. Then Kamilla came out on the balcony with a camera. “Smile!” she shouted. Iben and the boy went over to the others, and then all four of them looked up at her. Peter made the children say cheese. Kamilla suggested that they go to the bakery to get some pastries.
They put both children in the pram. The neighbourhood was abuzz with Sunday and late summer; people were busy with garden work and afternoon coffee, a group of teenagers played ball, and some younger boys sat in an apple tree and threw rocks at a small group of girls playing hopscotch. The strong orange afternoon light made everything look clear and almost surreal. Peter’s brown eyes shone like illuminated stained glass, and she began to wonder about the yellow spot she thought he had in his left eye, which he definitely once had, but that she hadn’t noticed in a long time.
“What a day!” he said, pushing her to the side so he could take over the pram. “And here we are taking a stroll,” she said. “Yeah,” he said, “here we are taking a stroll.”
The bakery was closed so they had to go to the petrol station at the other end of town. They walked in step, side by side. They talked a little about the older girls. Iben said they should probably start thinking about birth control for the oldest one. “For Christ’s sake, she’s only fourteen!” Peter said, raising his voice. Iben told him that the youngest one was still lagging behind in school and was getting terrible grades. “You have to go over her homework with her more,” she said. Peter snorted, “Birth control!” She looked up at a poplar tree and caught sight of a squirrel. She counted to ten slowly to herself. A large BMW was parking in front of them. “They’ve got too much fucking money around here,” said Peter, stepping testily to the side as the car backed over a large puddle. “We’ll never have that problem,” she said. Then he stopped at the hotdog stand and got the children hot dogs with ketchup and relish. He bought a hamburger for himself. She had a bite, and he wiped ketchup from her cheek. They shared a pint of chocolate milk. “Like the old days,” he said, with his mouth full of relish, “before we learned how to cook.” “When we lived on fried cod roe,” she said. “With mushy potatoes,” he said. “Yeah, and that was because you insisted on cooking them in the duvets, like your mother taught you, but you can only make rice pudding that way.” Then the girl began to cry and he pulled her out of the pram and swung her around. That scared her and she gulped down most of her hot dog. Iben hurried to walk ahead. It was such a beautiful day.
They stood in the convenience store at the petrol station, each with a child in their arms—he wanted a lemon pound cake and she, a marzipan cake. They ended up buying both. On the way back, he wanted to have a cigarette. “Why didn’t you buy some yourself?” she asked. “I didn’t think of it,” he answered, as she rooted around in her pocket for a match. She sighed. He began to hum an old pop song, and soon he was screaming it at the top of his lungs. People in their gardens turned to look at them. The girl fell asleep. The light grew deeper in colour, redder, and she said she’d heard that at some point people who are dying blaze up, become their old selves again, full of energy, so that their loved ones almost think that they’re about to come round, and then suddenly they die; this feels unexpected and so it comes as a big shock. Peter threw his cigarette over a wrought-iron gate. “That’s what they deserve,” he said. “Did you hear anything I said?” she asked. “Rich bastards!” he yelled. The man passing them on the path in a polo shirt and tan trousers stared condescendingly, first at them, then at the worn pram, which they had bought for the older girls.
When they got back to Kamilla’s house, the girls came bounding up the garden path. The eldest smacked the garden gate into Peter’s stomach. Kamilla came walking across the lawn with a coffee pot. “They’re going down to get the dog at Madsen’s,” Iben said. “What the hell is the dog doing at Madsen’s?” Peter asked. “They used to have a dog salon, Peter. You know that Mum and Dad always got Bonnie trimmed there.” Peter looked at Iben with an expression that made her laugh hysterically. “Peter! It’s a terrier,” she said, miffed. “It needs to be trimmed once in a while, and Madsen does it on the cheap.” Iben took the boy out of the pram and walked a little way away. “A terrier!” she heard him say, and she began to titter and pushed herself forward in order not to laugh outright. She could feel that Peter was watching her. She heard him laugh loudly. “You two!” said Kamilla, who was disappointed about the pastries. She had been looking forward to cream puffs. And it was cold now, even though all three of them were wrapped in duvets. Iben still didn’t dare look at Peter. Laughter stirred in her throat; for a moment she was afraid she’d begin to cry. The boy stuffed a large piece of lemon pound cake in his mouth. The girl sighed in her sleep. Peter said, “Can you take the girls next weekend? Dorte’s parents are coming to stay with us.” “Poor you,” said Iben, wiping the boy’s mouth. He was busy pulling apart a dead flower. A cold wind blew the petals onto the grass. She had finally got control of herself. “I thought you were coming to Aunt Janne’s birthday on Sunday,” said Kamilla. “Sorry,” said Peter, shooting Iben a look, who suddenly had to put her hand to her mouth to hold back the laughter. Kamilla leaned back in the chair. “How long have you two been divorced?” she asked. “Seven years in November,” said Iben, looking at Peter. “Isn’t that right?” He nodded. “Seven years in November,” he repeated. The sun shone right in his eyes, and she finally caught sight of the yellow spot in the brown. She felt strangely relieved. She knew it was there somewhere.
TRANSLATED BY DENISE NEWMAN
THE MAN IN THE BOAT
PER OLOV ENQUIST
THE STORY, as I recounted it to Mats …
This all took place the summer I was nine. We lived by a lake called Bursjön, a fine lake, large, with small islands. I was nine and Håkan was ten. A river passed through the lake, entering at the northern end and flowing out at the southern. It came from far up in Lappmarken, and in spring timber was floated downstream. In May I could see it all from our window: the lake filling with logs, lumps of ice and ice floes, the timber slowly drifting southwards, and then, one day that same month, finally disappearing.
But not all the timber went. Some of it strayed off to the side, got stuck on the shore, stranded. They were top-quality logs, thick and impressive; they were buoyant, riding high in the water. We knew what would happen to them. After a week the log drivers would come, nudge the logs out from the shore, manoeuvre them together and shove them off in the wake of the others. The log drivers walked along the shore, or some of them rowed in boats; they could clean up the lake in a day, removing everything. They were called the “rear crew”. When the rear crew left, the lake was empty once more.
That was the reason Håkan and I hid the three logs. There was a ditch running into the lake, at the very spot where we lived. We hauled the logs into the ditch and up twenty metres, and then we laid them all in a long row, stashed away in the grass at the side, which covered them up, camouflaging them. It took a whole day. We knew very well it was forbidden, but Håkan said that it didn’t matter, because it was only the company who would lose out, and they had enough money anyway. They could wait a year or two for their timber.
Håkan knew all about it. The day the rear crew left, we lay low at the edge of the forest, watching the log drivers. They were walking along the shore, while a rowing boat was out on the water. Now and then one of them found a log and dragged it into the water, and then the men in the boat took over. We could hear their voices. It was still spring; we heard them talking, but we couldn’t hear what they said. And I remember how Håkan and I lay there in the undergrowth at the edge of the forest, out of view and motionless, watching the log drivers draw nearer as they talked to one another. When they reached the ditch where we had hidden our three logs, they stopped for a while and had a smoke, and I can still remember how clearly I could hear Håkan’s breathing and my own heartbeat—as distinctly as if they were echoing in the cool spring air.
But they walked on. And they didn’t see the logs. The next day the lake was empty of timber and log drivers, and the rear crew had gone for another year. But we still had the logs. And the lake was ours. We alone had command of it now, for the whole summer.
We waited two days, just in case. But I remember being woken early on the morning of the third day by someone knocking on my window. It was Håkan, who had climbed up the fire escape to the first floor and was hanging there, making faces and sticking out his tongue and tapping on the pane of glass. I got up and walked across the floor, which was comfortably cool under my feet, and I could see that Håkan was holding something in his hand: a hammer. We were going to do it today. Right now.
I threw on some clothes. I must have eaten breakfast as well, but it couldn’t have taken long. I ran out. Håkan was sitting behind the house, by the wall, wearing his red shirt and blue plimsolls, holding the hammer and a packet of three-inch nails, and smiling at me as I approached.
“Now, damn it,” he said, “we’re going to start building!”
That morning we began constructing the raft. We dragged the logs out into the water again, placed the longest in the middle and the other two on either side, and whacked some struts on top. One cross plank at the front, which we nailed onto the logs; three planks in the middle and two at the rear. We used three-inch nails, except at the back, where we used six-inch ones that Håkan had got hold of somewhere.
“When we don’t need it any more,” he said in a thick voice, his mouth full of nails, “we’ll chuck the planks away and pull the nails out. If we leave the nails in, it’s really bad for the saw blade. And it ruins the old boys’ piecework rate.”
He worked in silence for a moment, and then he said, “You mustn’t forget the piecework rate.”
Håkan was only a year older than me, but he knew a huge amount and he taught me lots of things. I remember that summer very well: we built a raft of three logs; it had a sail on it; Håkan was there. It was the summer I was nine and he was ten. It was 1943.
It only took a day to finish it.
*
Håkan weighed thirty-eight kilos and I weighed thirty-five. The logs lay deep in the water. Generally, only a tenth of the log sticks up. It depends partly on how green it is. Some are pretty much sunken timber, while others float high in the water. Together, we weighed seventy-three kilos. When the wind blew, the waves nearly always splashed over the deck and came up in the gap between the logs. The water was quite cold to begin with, no more than 14 to 15 degrees; we were wearing wellingtons. Apart from that, the raft was well kitted out. For the most part, we pushed ourselves along. The pole was exactly three metres long and reached quite a distance out. Two pieces of plank were supposed to be paddles (but it was almost impossible to paddle; very slow at any rate). We had provisions in a small food container right at the back (secured with a one-inch nail to the rear platform). They consisted of: 1 bottle of water, 1 piece of sausage (10 cm long), 1 half-loaf, 8 biscuits, 1 knife, 100 grams margarine, 20 sugar cubes, 1 small tin of treacle (a kind of dark syrup that the cows were given, but Håkan maintained it was better than ordinary syrup; I didn’t like treacle myself, but he wanted to take a tin with us and I didn’t argue). Those were our provisions. Our armoury on the raft was a wooden crossbow with six arrows, a willow slingshot for pine cones plus ammunition (thirty-five cones) and Håkan’s old catapult with spare elastic and ten smallish stones.
There was no doubt, we ruled the lake.
However, the day I have to tell you about, when everything ended and everything began, we went out quite late. It was after seven in the evening; we had said we were going fishing, for which we were given permission. It was August. For the last two days, we had been experimenting with a sail on the raft, stretching a sheet between two long sticks. Sometimes we held onto the sticks ourselves, at other times we tried to lash them down. Neither way really worked, but this evening there was a good wind, coming straight off the land. After we had secured the provisions and ammunition, we set out. The sun was just setting on the other side, the wind was strong and we could see we were skimming along nicely, being blown out into the middle of the lake. It was all rather lovely; I didn’t want to mention it to Håkan, but as the sun went down, it was beautiful. Whenever I confided to him my thoughts about that kind of thing, Håkan would laugh.
It is at this precise point that I find it hardest to recall exactly what happened—but I’ll try to explain it all the same. Håkan was sitting in front and said he had just spied an enemy skiff we needed to ram. He ordered full sail, commanded the crew to stand by with the grappling irons, and he went astern to fetch the crossbow, which was lying in the middle of the raft. By this time, the waves were fairly high and it was dusk as well. Now I remember better: darkness had started to fall, except in the direction the sun had set, where the sky was still red—and Håkan stood up and walked astern to fetch his crossbow. The whole surface of the raft was quite slippery and slithery, and I saw him stagger and step to the side; and then he lost his balance. It all happened right in front of me. Håkan’s silhouette swaying and toppling over against the deep pink horizon. I remember it clearly. And I remember equally clearly his face in the water; I could see he was scared and embarrassed at the same time (scared because he couldn’t swim very well, embarrassed because he had been so clumsy).
There was a heavy swell on the lake. I held my hand out to him. It was just as the light was fading; poor visibility, extremely cold water, a deep pink streak where the sun had set. Håkan’s face, down there in the water, smiling, as if he were thinking: Damn it, how stupid of me! And I stretched out my hand to him.
The next thing I remember must have been quite some time later. An hour perhaps, probably more. I was sitting aft. Håkan was sitting at the bow end, on the forward platform. He was sitting with his back to me, huddled up. Huddled up, as if he was freezing cold. When I looked around on the raft, I realized we must have lost a lot of our things in the confusion when Håkan fell in. The sail was gone. The bits of wood that were supposed to be paddles were gone. The pole to push ourselves along with was gone. The entire raft was empty, apart from the nailed-down food container with emergency provisions, because I was sitting on that—and apart from Håkan and me, sitting hunched up, at either end of the raft.
And yet the most remarkable thing was something else; and I have thought long and hard about this since, and come somehow to the conclusion that there is a gap in my memory somewhere. The remarkable thing was that the wind had stopped, totally. It was utterly calm: the waves had subsided, the water was like a mirror. It was completely still and completely dark. It felt like the middle of the night, but the moon had risen. It was shining. The moon was almost full, the night was black, the water flat; but the moon was shining. It looked so strange. In the shimmering path of moonlight reflecting on the lake was a silent raft, almost a wreck, and on it two boys crouched; the water was like silver, still and absolutely soundless.
We must be in the middle of the lake, I thought. When I turned, I saw the lights from home, small white dots, far away, like tiny white pinpricks in black velvet. I looked at the moon. Then back at the water, at the curious white moonlight and the raft in the middle of the shimmering moon path, at Håkan’s rigid back. It felt like a dream, so strange, the quietness so deep I didn’t dare to break it. I wanted to speak to Håkan, but instead I said nothing.
We sat in silence, for a long, long time.
I don’t know what I was thinking about. I know I tried to work out what had happened, how Håkan had fallen in, how he had climbed back up, why he was sitting there, so silent. Why the wind had stopped. Why the waves had dropped. Why the moon was shining. I must have thought about how we would get home. We had nothing to row with, no sail, no wind.
I must have felt cold, but I have no recollection of that. I remember the peculiar stillness, the motionless black water, the moon, the raft in the middle of the moon path, the silence, the pitch-black night around us.
An hour or so passed, perhaps. Then I heard the faint sound, as if from an immense distance, of oars. The sound didn’t come from home, but from due east, which was odd, because there were no houses in that direction. But it was the stroke of oars, no doubt about it. I sat with my head turned to the east, staring straight out into the inky blackness, but could see nothing.
The stroke of oars came closer and closer. He was rowing slowly. Splish. Splash. I couldn’t see anything. Nearer and nearer. Then, all at once, a boat appeared against the reflection of the moon on the water, the silhouette slowly slipping into the moon path. As it came towards us, I could see the back of the man who was rowing.
I stood up and could see that Håkan was on his feet too. We stood still, staring at the boat gliding towards us.
“Hello,” I shouted, over the water, “please, come and help us!”
The man in the boat didn’t turn round. He didn’t look at us. He simply let the boat glide silently up to us and lifted the oars. Water dripping from the oars, the boat gliding, as in a dream, the man not turning round—I remember it so well. Why didn’t he answer?
And then he reached us. Came to rest beside the raft. And only then did he turn around.
I saw his face in the moonlight. I didn’t recognize him. I had never seen him before. He had dark hair, a thin face, he didn’t look at me. He looked only at Håkan. He was not from these parts, but he had come to help us. And he stretched his hand out to Håkan, and Håkan took his hand and stepped carefully into the dinghy and sat at the stern. Neither of them said a single word. And I stood still and watched them.
The rowing boat then slowly moved off, so imperceptibly I didn’t understand what was happening at first. But the man had sat down, sat down at the oars. And started to row. Håkan sat in the stern, his back to me, and he didn’t move, didn’t look at me. The man started to row, and the boat slowly disappeared in the darkness.
I couldn’t call out. I stood still, turned to stone. I must have stayed there like that for a long time.
What I remember of this is so confused, it’s difficult to recount. I must have sat down on the platform at the back. I must have been extremely cold. I know that I opened the box with emergency provisions, I ate. I lifted out the tin of treacle, the syrup I didn’t actually like; I ate it. I dipped my fingers in and put it in my mouth; it tasted sweet. I sat on the platform at the back and watched dawn breaking, watched the light creeping in over the lake, the morning mists rising and lifting, until finally it was light.
And then the boats came.
It was Grandfather who arrived first. Later on, they said they had been searching and calling for a long time, but I hadn’t answered. I told them I hadn’t heard their shouts. Grandfather arrived first. I stood up, my face sticky with the treacle that had run down my chin. Grandfather took my hand and lifted me into the boat; my face was covered in treacle, but I was perfectly calm. I remember I lay down flat on my back in the bottom of the boat, lay still, staring straight up, while they wrapped blankets around me, and Grandfather started to row, very fast, as if in a great hurry. I was lying in the bottom of the dinghy. My lips and chin were sticky with the treacle that had run down my neck. Grandfather was rowing. I lay there, looking at his face.
I must have been very ill after this. I remember being in bed with a fever, dreaming such strange dreams. Sometimes I was bathed in sweat; other times I slept and was woken by my own screams. They came in and sat with me: Mama was there, Grandfather and Grandmother, and Annika. Many days must have passed; I don’t know how many.
Until one day I was well. It happened so quickly, it was like switching on a light. First very ill. Then—all at once—I woke one day and was completely well.
Grandfather was sitting with me.
“What happened to the raft?” I asked. “Did you bring it ashore or is it still out there?”
“We brought it in,” he said.
“Is it moored now?”
“No,” he said very calmly, “we broke it up and got rid of the timber. I did it myself the same day.”
“Oh,” I said. “Did you take all the nails out?”
“I did,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said. “Otherwise the chaps at the sawmill would have caught the nails on the saw and it would have ruined their piecework rate.”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“What was the name of the man rowing the boat Håkan went in?”
But Grandfather didn’t reply; he just sat there, looking pensive.
“He wasn’t from round here,” I said. “He looked like Eriksson who works the barking drum at the sawmill, but it wasn’t him.”
“No,” Grandfather said softly. “Now you have to get some more sleep.”
He was standing at the door, looking at me, and when I started to tell him what had happened that night, he looked slightly irritated, or something else—he looked odd—and he just turned and left, quite abruptly. The next day, the first day I was allowed to get up, he came back and asked me to tell him. And I told him everything.
He just sat there, looking pensive, as he often used to do in the chapel; whenever things became slow and boring and serious, he would sit and think about fishing. He looked pensive then. He was looking exactly the same now, so I assumed he was thinking about fishing again.
I said, “It’s a good job you pulled all the nails out. It would have ruined their piecework rate.”
Then he said, straight into the air, “Well now, about Håkan. He didn’t come back.”
That summer I read a great deal. The book I liked best was the story of the Flying Dutchman. He had once committed a dreadful crime: he had not reached out his hand to some drowning sailors—he had thought only of himself—and he had let them drown. So he was damned: whenever he and his ship came to a port, a headwind blew up and he was unable to enter the harbour. He had to continue to the next one, and the next, and the next.
And there he sailed, year in, year out. Sailors would see him coming in his ship, in the middle of the night, in a fierce storm, and in the moonlight they saw him standing on the deck, lashed to the wheel, doomed to sail for evermore. An unknown man.
I told Grandfather about it.
“Do you understand?” I said. “That’s the only time you see him, in the middle of the night. He comes sailing along in the moonlight. Isn’t it strange? An unknown man, who never speaks to anyone, but just arrives, at night, in the moonlight. Do you understand, Grandfather?”
“No. What about?” Grandfather asked.
“Well,” I said, “an unknown man, a stormy night, and you see him in the moonlight. He just comes gliding along in the moonlight! Do you see? There must be a connection, mustn’t there?”
“I don’t understand,” Grandfather cut me short.
“He came rowing from the east that night,” I said. “You know as well as I do that there’s no one living in the east. Not here by the lake. Not even a tourist. But he came from the east.”
In July I began a systematic exploration of the lake’s eastern shores. I didn’t tell the others what I was doing. The grown-ups had already taken me aside for long talks, long, serious talks, about what, I don’t recall, don’t want to recall. They would never understand, they would only ask me to do something else, to help out in the cowshed, to think about something else, something else, something else.
I decided to explore the lake’s eastern shores.
It was in July 1943, a very warm summer. Håkan always used to call the eastern part of the lake “the cesspool”—it wasn’t very pleasant, there were lots of tree stumps and rubbish in the water, the bottom was mucky and slimy, the shore was scrubby and in some places cleared of trees in that barren kind of way that made you thirsty just by looking at it. I took some water in a bottle and I began to search. I started furthest away down by the shore and then walked up a hundred metres. Then diagonally down to the beach again, then up. In this way I would be able to comb the entire area.
I walked for several hours, got very thirsty, drank some water. When my water ran out, I went home.
In July I searched the eastern part of the lake, and I found nothing. The only thing I came upon was the remains of a half-rotted boat, a dinghy. It had been pulled a long way up on land, with its hull in the air. It must have been there for years.
I sat down on the boat. The sun was shining and it was very warm. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, loudly, out across the water, “Håkan! Håkan! Håkan!”
But no answer came. No echo. Nothing at all. And then I knew, finally, that there was no trace of Håkan in the eastern part of the lake, and no trace of the man in the boat.
In September that year I searched for the last time.
September was the month I liked best. In Västerbotten’s coastal regions the cold arrived quite early, the autumnal colours started appearing in the middle of the month, and in the last two weeks you could break a thin layer of ice on the puddles every morning. The entire lake seemed embedded in a band of dark green and golden red. All the forests looked like that. Green from the conifers, golden red from the birch trees. Mist lay over the lake, and it was cold.
On one of the last days of that month, I took Grandfather’s boat and rowed out. I didn’t have permission, but I did it. It was the day of my ninth birthday.
I rowed around the whole lake. There was a thin mist everywhere, a mist that was almost transparent and only a few metres high, but which nevertheless made me feel as though I were rowing in an empty, forsaken world. As if I was completely alone. And it felt good.
I rowed around the whole lake. And then I rowed out into the middle. I pulled up the oars, settled down and waited.
It was lonely in the mist, in a very strange way; it felt safe. I thought about everything that had happened and, oddly, I no longer felt despair when I thought about Håkan’s disappearance. I just didn’t understand how it had happened, who the man in the boat was. Why had he left me behind? Where was Håkan now? Why didn’t he come back?
I must have sat there for an hour. Then I saw a boat coming towards me, out of the mist.
It was a dinghy with a man rowing. Someone was sitting in the stern with his face turned towards me.
There could be no mistake. It was Håkan. The dinghy glided slowly towards me, without a sound, straight through the mist, and I wasn’t in the least bit afraid. Håkan was sitting in the stern, looking right at me, and he looked exactly the same as before. And he smiled at me.
It was utterly silent. I sat still and watched the other dinghy glide slowly towards me, next to me, past me. The whole time Håkan was looking at me, a peculiar expression on his face. With a slight smile, he was looking right at me. As if he wanted to say: Here I am. You don’t need to search any more. You’ve found me. And now you’ve found me, you have to stop searching for me. I’m fine. You must understand that. You have to stop searching for me, because you’ve found me. And now you need to be yourself. You need to be grown up.
We didn’t say a word, but we looked at one another. And we both smiled. And then the dinghy slid away, and they were gone. And since that time I haven’t seen my only friend Håkan again.
I sat still for a long time, thinking, before I took up the oars to start rowing; but at that moment I saw something floating in the water. It was a long pole. It was the pole we used to push ourselves along on the raft. I thought: Håkan wanted to give it back. That’s good. I’ll pick it up.
I picked it up. And then I rowed back.
When I returned, Grandfather was standing on the shore. I saw him from a distance. He looked furious, which always makes his body go rigid and weird, his shoulders drop and he glares directly in front of him. I wasn’t afraid, though. I steered the boat straight for the shore, lifted the oars, picked up the pole and threw it onto the beach.
He looked at it and said, “Where did you find that?”
All I said was, “I’ve got it back.”
