Quicksand Read online

  The following day she sent me to a laboratory. They did a test on my liver, the result of which ought to have been 20 – my reading was 2,000. I don’t recall what the test was called.

  ‘This is not something I can deal with,’ she said. ‘Not here in Mozambique. I’ll telephone a hospital in Johannesburg – you must get yourself there today.’

  The South African Airways flight that evening from Maputo was not long, only forty-five minutes. I stood there outside the airport entrance and smoked a cigarette. When the car from the hospital in Sandton arrived I squashed the butt under my heel. I didn’t realise at the time that it was the last cigarette I would ever smoke.

  Within a few days they had established that I was suffering from a particularly aggressive form of jaundice. I suspected that I had been infected by dirty vegetables during a trip to the north of Mozambique where I had eaten in a few restaurants with somewhat unreliable levels of hygiene.

  That was at Christmas in 1992. It was still by no means clear what was going to happen in South Africa now that the apartheid system was falling apart. During the nights, as I lay in my hospital bed, I occasionally heard gunfire somewhere out there in the darkness. Johannesburg was a city infected with criminality. Hatred between the races was widespread, as was fear.

  On the morning of the third day a doctor I hadn’t seen before came into my room.

  ‘We have scrutinised the X-ray pictures we took yesterday,’ he said, his broken English revealing the fact that he must have been a recent immigrant, probably from Eastern Europe. ‘We have found a dark patch in one of your lungs. We don’t yet know for sure what it is. But soon.’

  He left the room. The door had barely closed behind him when a thought struck me: cancer. The fact that I had extinguished that cigarette outside the airport in Johannesburg was not going to help me. Smoking meant that I was now going to die.

  A memory from Skellefteå in the beginning of the 1970s flashed through my mind. Old Dr Sigrid Nygren, an inveterate theatre enthusiast, had conducted a general medical check-up on me. I had just recently turned twenty.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You should stop. Otherwise you’ll go down with cancer in what should be the best years of your life, when you’re forty or forty-five.’

  I was forty-four now. I lay there in hospital with my jaundice and waited for information about what the doctors had discovered in the X-ray. I couldn’t get the thought of death out of my mind. I lay there conducting a pathetic but at the same time entirely natural bargaining exercise, promising to be an infinitely better person if only the diagnosis wasn’t cancer.

  Afterwards, when the doctor had informed me that it was just a deposit of fluid in my left lung and not a tumour, I realised that what had scared me most of all was my age. I would die eventually, of course, like everybody else: but I didn’t want to die yet. Not before I had even reached the age of forty-five.

  When I was diagnosed with an aggressive primary tumour in my left lung, one of my first reactions was one of disbelief. After all, I hadn’t smoked at all for twenty years. So how could I have lung cancer? That was one of the few occasions when I came close to feeling sorry for myself. It felt unjust. But I didn’t give in. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes the only thing one can do is to complain.

  I still feel the same. If you are a child, a teenager, young or middle-aged, then of course you will feel it is unfair if you are diagnosed with cancer. But if, like me, you have lived for approaching seventy years, longer than most people in the world could ever dream of, it is easier to become reconciled to the fact that an incurable disease has taken over your body.

  That is only partly true, of course. it’s not quite as easy as that. Death always comes as an uninvited guest and makes a mess of everything:

  ‘It’s time to leave now.’

  Nobody wants to die, whether they are young or old. Dying is always difficult. Especially if you are on your own.

  In the early 1960s, when I spent a few years following humanities courses at the Högre Allmänna Läroverket school in Borås, the much-despised morning assembly was compulsory. In those days it was dominated by some kind of Christian service. There were very few exceptions. On one occasion the remarkable actor Kolbjörn Knudsen delivered a short extract from Peer Gynt, which succeeded in waking up pupils who were dozing off or surreptitiously doing their homework. Sometimes there were poetry readings, mainly poems by Ferlin or Gullberg recited in a shaky voice by a nervous senior pupil.

  But most often the assemblies were conducted by some clergyman or other. I particularly remember one hospital chaplain. He came to the school at regular intervals and told us about the final hours of young patients in his spiritual care at the hospital, dying from some fatal disease. His theme was always the same: even for very young people the horror of death can become tolerable if you commend your soul to God.

  The sentimentality and duplicity were repulsive. He nearly always started crying himself as he told his tales. It seemed to me that he must have been typical of the most bigoted of Sunday-school preachers.

  Later in life I came across the German writer Georg Büchner, who died in his early twenties. By then he had already written a shocking manifesto in Hessen, been deported and hunted by the secret police, written three masterpieces – especially Danton’s Death and Woyzeck – as well as a doctoral thesis on the nervous system of fish.

  When he died he was living in Spiegelgasse in Zürich. He had been stricken by typhus. I often used to wonder about how this gifted man reacted to the news that he was about to die when he had barely begun to live life. His desperation and despondency must have been hellish. Or did he simply ignore the facts that ought to have dominated every second of his life? Perhaps he did what seems to be the usual thing, and as death approached he began to draw up grandiose plans for the future that lay in store once he had risen from his sickbed.

  A cold winter’s morning was soon to break as I sat there in my red armchair and allowed my thoughts to wander. Perhaps I dozed off. The moonlight that had illuminated my bookcase had faded away. I must remember to ring Lars Eriksson and order at least another twenty metres of oak shelving. Oak from Latvia, I suddenly recalled. I had no idea why Swedish oak was evidently not good enough even for bookshelves.

  I was sixty-six years old and had been stricken by cancer. Before long I would begin a course of chemotherapy. Neither I nor the doctors around me knew whether or not it would be successful.

  I didn’t dare to think about what would happen if the chemotherapy was ineffective.

  It didn’t matter if I was sixty-six years old or a child in a hospital in Sveg facing up to the reality of death for the first time.

  9

  Hagar Qim

  The Temple was built before I was born. The temple will still exist after I am dead.

  Very early on in life I decided that there were two Mediterranean islands I really must visit. While sitting through boring lessons at school I would have my atlas open, studying Crete and Malta. I knew about Knossos and the dolphins depicted on the walls of the ruined palace there, but in those days Malta was little more than a name to me.

  However, I longed to go there. I’m not sure exactly what it was that enticed me so. One winter, when I was about thirty, I took a train to Athens and then the ferry to Crete. I spent a month in Heraklion, reading up on local history, which I thought I knew too little about. It was a damp and chilly winter. I read and went for walks, ate at cheap restaurants and occasionally went to the cinema.

  Malta was a different story altogether. I went there in 2012. It was about as hot as Africa – a silent wall of sheer sunlight. And when I went there, at long last I knew why.

  On the south-west coast of Malta there is something that nowadays can probably be designated the world’s oldest building that is still standing. On a stone plateau overlooking the sea is the temple known as Hagar Qim, which simply means ‘raised stones’. There are, in fac
t, several buildings that have been joined together over a very long period of time. But it has been established that the oldest parts are between 5,000 and 6,000 years old. Around that time, or perhaps slightly earlier, Malta was inhabited by farmers who had arrived by boat from Sicily. That was the period known as the younger Stone Age.

  The temple, nowadays regarded as one of the oldest in existence created by human hands and not reduced to ruins or fragments, is astonishingly skilfully built. The observer is astounded by the precision with which various gigantic blocks of stone have been joined together.

  We know little more about the people who built the temple than I have already stated: they were farmers who came to this uninhabited island as colonisers. Archaeological investigations of burial sites have produced the remains of primitive tools, but nothing to suggest military equipment. The incomers had peaceful, not war-like, intentions.

  We do not know who or what was worshipped in this temple. There are no inscriptions or legends to suggest who their gods were. It is evident from the remains that have been discovered that animals were sacrificed, but we have no idea about the religion of the colonists. Their gods have fallen silent for ever.

  All that is left is the substantial stone building they raised. The efforts involved must have been immense. There must have been individuals who acted as architects, others who planned the building projects, and above all those who did the manual work. We can safely assume that it took a very long time, and that the temple was never actually finished but was constantly changed, made more attractive and more majestic. Perhaps their religion was quite simply the building of this temple? A wordless cult that expressed itself via the cutting, moving, lifting and joining together of stone? Nobody knows.

  Many hundreds of years after these immigrants came to Malta from Sicily, other groups of people followed suit. These new arrivals were also peaceful and mingled happily with the inhabitants already ensconced there. But later on other, more war-like, immigrants arrived in Malta, took possession of the island and hence also the temple. New symbolic worlds were established and different gods came to be worshipped as the centuries passed. As in so many other places during the history of the world, the gods were hounded out of their temple and replaced by other tenants to whom prayers were said.

  —

  Six thousand years is a long time, no matter what you compare it with. If we reckon every human generation spans about thirty years, it corresponds to at least two hundred generations.

  The temple complex was built at least a thousand years before the Cheops pyramid. The temples of the Aztecs and the Maya civilisation are even younger in comparison. The majestic cathedrals built by the stonemasons of Europe came into being less than a thousand years ago. In the long-term perspective they are barely teenagers.

  Hagar Qim stands there as a solitary monolith inviting the same kind of reverence as a very old human being. The temple illustrates a fact that is both unexpected and crucial for what I am trying to say: even if it seems a very long time ago, 6,000 years is an insignificant period of time when we try nowadays to construct buildings that will keep nuclear waste safe for at least 100,000 years. The difference is staggering – 94,000 years. Nothing created by man will ever come close to the task we have before us – the task at which we must succeed.

  Today we can board an aeroplane and a few hours later disembark at an airport just outside Valetta. Then we can travel by car southwards along the meandering roads, and come to the temple that is lying there in wait for us. The stone columns stare out silently over the sea, like hidden guards keeping watch on the horizon for boatloads of new immigrants.

  Hagar Qim is indeed a very old building – but there are cave paintings and ivory sculptures reckoned to be 40,000 years old. Needless to say, both the animals depicted by the cave painters and the Hagar Qim temple are examples of the ability of human beings to create art.

  But nothing in the human world was there to start with; everything has been created and developed.

  That is made clear by the sculpture of the lion man that was discovered in south-eastern Germany a few days before the outbreak of war in September 1939.

  10

  The lion man

  The late summer of 1939 was very hot throughout Europe. The beaches and seaside resorts in Sweden were full of people. Many people still living could recall the suffocating heat that enveloped Europe during the summer of 1914, in the months before the outbreak of the First World War. Their unease increased as the Austrian corporal’s demands regarding the borders of Germany became increasingly implacable. The key event that sparked the First World War was the assassination of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo; behind it lay both stupidity and arrogance, but also political dreams of expansion and colonial domination.

  The risks of war were now increasing again. There were those who maintained, rightly, that the First World War had never actually ended. There had been a pause for just over twenty years. Now the curtain was about to rise on Act II if the European leaders failed to find a way of preventing Hitler from converting his threats into action. But his demands grew more ominous by the day. England’s prime minister, Chamberlain, came back from a summit meeting with a document signed by the German chancellor; many people doubted the validity of this ‘scrap of paper’, and suspected that the words uttered by Chamberlain when he disembarked from the aeroplane about ‘Peace in our time’ were among the most misguided ever spoken by a politician.

  But not everybody was lying on beaches and making the most of the heat, or going through agonies regarding the increasing threat of war. Some archaeologists were investigating a series of caves in Stadel in the Swabian Alps in deepest south-east Germany. The fact that Nazi soldiers had begun their advance into Poland was not important to them.

  In fact, a few days before the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939 they made a discovery – or rather, a lot of small finds they made would turn out to be a major discovery. They found some two hundred fragments of ivory from the tusk of a mammoth, and collected them with the scrupulous care characteristic of conscientious and passionate archaeologists.

  But that was that. War broke out and the bag containing the ivory remains was stowed away in a cupboard in a museum until 1970. Then at last experts began to link together the fragments that had been collected over thirty years previously. It soon became clear that it was possible to envisage how they fitted together into some form of sculpture, but that a lot of parts were missing. In 1989 another search was made of the cave, and more fragments were recovered. So far, about a thousand fragments have been found, many of them very tiny.

  In 1939 it was clear that an astonishing discovery had been made – something that would dramatically change the history of how human beings began to create art. Now it became obvious that the sculpture slowly being pieced together was of a human being with the head of a lion.

  There are simpler figures carved by human beings that can be assumed to be older than this lion. But the crucial and revolutionary aspect of this 30-centimetre-tall ivory sculpture is precisely the combination of human being and animal. Here an artist has been at work, someone who created something more than merely a carving of a figure out of a mammoth’s tusk, something more than just a reproduction of an animal on a cave wall. The remarkable thing is that the artist has created something unexpected. He – or she – has imagined an abstraction, something that doesn’t exist in the real world. In his or her mind’s eye he or she has conjured up a mixture of a human being and a lion. We cannot possibly know why the artist decided to produce a concrete image of this vision. Is the sculpture supposed to suggest that a man can possess the power of a lion? Or that a predator can possess human traits? The artist has created something of which there is no model, something quite new, a combination of the fantastic and the real.

  Has the artist imagined that the finished sculpture already exists inside the ivory? And that his or her task is simply to cut away everything
unnecessary in order to release the sculpture of the lion man that was waiting to become alive?

  The archaeologists who have researched the sculpture have concluded that it must have taken about two months to make, given the knives of flint to which the sculptor would have had access. Two months of work in daylight.

  We can draw another conclusion from this. The man or woman who created the lion man must have lived together with other people who were able to ensure that he or she was supplied with sufficient food. The artist was looked after. And this leads to two more conclusions. There was some form of social organisation able to provide for someone who didn’t go hunting or collecting plants. And this suggests that the sculptor must have had special significance for the group as a whole. Did this take the form of some kind of religious worship? Or were the people surrounding the artist impressed by what he or she was able to produce? Was the artist regarded as a kind of magician?

  The fact that the artist was able to produce a symbolic figure makes specific demands on the capacity of the brain. What is known as the prefrontal cortex is not a part of the early stages of the development of the human mind. It comprises the front part of the frontal lobe and has to do with our ability to acknowledge or to ignore various external stimuli. These would include information that dictates an individual’s actions.

  And so, 40,000 years ago, a person sat with a piece of ivory in his or her hand. Perhaps he or she had previously carved out remarkable symbolic figures? Or was this the first sculpture made by the artist, which as a result of a marvellous coincidence has survived and in recent times been pieced together again, in almost complete form? We cannot know.

  We don’t know who the artist was. He or she has left behind no means of identification. Nor is it plausible that it was important for the man or the woman to explain to future civilisations that he or she was the person who had created this remarkable work of art.