Daniel Read online

  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 belon
g 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.

  On
e 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?