Daniel Read online

  And yet he felt utterly safe.

  He had survived in spite of everything. He had arrived somewhere. The magnet had loosened its grip. He had arrived at an unknown point where there were people, a bit of Sweden, something he could recognise.

  He woke himself in the dark because he was snoring.

  But when he opened his eyes the snoring continued. Andersson was asleep, rolled up in a zebra pelt next to a burning whale-oil lamp. Bengler crept carefully out of his hammock to take a piss. He fumbled his way in the dark towards a door or a curtain, and, without actually noticing how it happened, he found himself outside. In the distance some fires were burning. People were talking in low voices, shadows flickered, a baby cried softly. He shuddered from the sudden cold and the night wind. Then he took a piss. As usual he wrote some numbers with his stream of urine. This time a four and a nine. He finished half of an eight. Then he was done.

  When he came in Andersson was awake. He sat wiping off soot from the glass of the whale-oil lamp.

  ‘While you were sleeping I tried to figure out who you were. I went through the load on your wagon. All I found was a number of books and plates of insects and some jars with worms and beetles in them. That was all. It’s like having a visit from a travelling insane asylum. Many people have passed through here, but none as crazy as you.’

  He left the lamp alone and lit a pipe.

  ‘In your catechism I read that you were from Hovmantorp. I looked on my old map of Sweden, but I couldn’t find it. Either you’re lying when you write in your notebooks, or Hovmantorp is an unknown place, even though it surprises me that there are still blank spots in a country like Sweden.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘That’s not a very precise question. Where is here? In the desert? In Africa? Or in this room?’

  ‘In Africa.’

  ‘Nineteen years. It amazes me every day that I’m still alive. It also astonishes all the blacks around me. It astonishes the oxen and the ostriches and perhaps even the wild dogs. But sometimes I think maybe I’m already dead. Without having noticed it.’

  He picked up a bottle of beer and took a drink.

  ‘If you hadn’t lanced that boil I probably would have died. If it gives you any satisfaction, I would gladly say that you came through the desert like a gentle saviour and saved my life.’

  ‘I was supposed to become a physician, but I wasn’t good enough.’

  ‘It’s common for Europeans who weren’t good enough to come to Africa. Here they can assert their skin colour and their god. Don’t have to be able to do anything, or want anything. Here you can live well by forcing people into submission. Illiterates from Germany come here and suddenly they’re the bosses of a hundred Africans whom they believe they are entitled to treat any way they like. East of this desert the Englishmen are doing the same thing; north of us sit the Portuguese, singing their sentimental songs and whipping the hide off their black workers. We export our skills to America. Those who come to Africa are either revivalist preachers or lazy brutes. And I’m neither a preacher nor a brute.’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘I have foresight. I make deals.’

  ‘I met a man in Cape Town named Wackman. He spoke of the importance of realising that the piano will create great fortunes in the future.’

  ‘Exactly. For once that man is right. Wackman is a vile person. He slashes the soles of his whores’ feet so they’ll never forget him. His real passion is small boys with light brown skin. He rubs them with oil. Rumour has it that on one occasion, after having mounted such a lad, he found it so wonderful that he set fire to the boy. The oil made the boy burn very quickly.’

  Bengler tried to assess whether Andersson was as cynical as he made out. How deep had the night cold and the loneliness actually penetrated him? Were there only frozen spaces inside, feelings embedded in blocks of ice, the same way that his beetles were drowned in alcohol? Or was there also something else?

  ‘I was searching for another focus in my life,’ Andersson said. ‘My father was a pharmacist and thought I ought to exhibit the same passion for liniment that he did. But I was born with a hatred of all salves. So I left. Stowed away on a wagon taking Lidköping porcelain to Gothenburg. And from there out into the world. Until I drifted ashore here. I went home one time, to bury my father. I arrived six months after he died, but they had left a hole in the ground so I could toss a little dirt on the coffin. Although I actually gave him desert sand. That was when I brought back the folk costume for Geijer.’

  ‘Is his name Geijer?’

  ‘I’ve forgotten his real name, but I christened him Geijer. A fine name. A clever fellow who wrote some poems that I still remember. Is he still alive?’

  ‘Erik Gustaf Geijer is dead.’

  ‘Everybody’s dead.’

  ‘You’re living in the middle of a desert.’

  ‘I hunt. I have the only trading post where the blacks are allowed inside. No Germans come here. They hate me the same way I hate them, because they know that I can see straight through them: their brutality, their fear.’

  ‘You hunt elephants?’

  ‘Nothing else. What were you thinking of putting in your empty glass jars?’

  ‘I’m going to catalogue insects. Systematise and name them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it hasn’t been done yet.’

  Andersson looked at him for a long time before he replied.

  ‘That’s an answer I mistrust. Doing something just because it hasn’t been done yet.’

  ‘It’s the only answer I have.’

  Andersson lay down and pulled a cover over himself.

  ‘You can stay here. I need company. Somebody to eat with, someone to lance my boils.’

  ‘I can’t pay you much.’

  ‘Company is enough.’

  He stayed in the place that Andersson had named New Vänersborg. At the back of the room where he spent his first night there was another room where Andersson stored his elephant tusks. This room was emptied and cleaned, and he moved in. The ox-drivers were dismissed, the animals were slaughtered, and Andersson helped him find new draught animals and ox-drivers, although Bengler had a feeling that Andersson was using them to spy on him. Andersson knew everything he thought, all the plans he had. He also suspected Andersson of reading his diaries and rummaging through his clothing. They ate dinner and talked in the evenings. But now and then Andersson would withdraw with his bottles of beer when a very beautiful black woman came to visit. That’s when Bengler would feel a fierce desire for Matilda. He resumed his habit of masturbating two or three times a day.

  Sometimes Andersson disappeared and might be away for several weeks at a time. During these periods the place was supervised by Geijer, who never seemed to take off his folk costume. The trading post carried salt, sugar, some grains, simple fabrics and ammunition. No money changed hands, everything was done on the barter system. The black men who showed up like lone ships in all that white came bearing tortoise shells or tusks. He never saw anything else. Then they vanished with their fabrics and their sacks. With Geijer he could hold simple conversations in Swedish. Andersson had taught him the language. For some strange reason Geijer spoke in the Gothenburg dialect. But since his vocabulary was limited and he always seemed to be struck by sadness when he didn’t understand what was said, Bengler never entered into very complicated discussions.

  Besides, he had his insects. The jars were slowly starting to fill up. But after seven months he had not yet found any insect that he could say with absolute certainty was unknown.

  One evening when he had been with Andersson for four months, he found a woman lying on the floor underneath his hammock when he went to bed. She was naked, with only a thin cover over her, and he guessed that she was no more than sixteen years old. He lay down in his hammock and listened to her breathing there below him. That night he slept fitfully and didn’t properly fall asleep until dawn. When he opened his eyes she was
gone. He asked Andersson who she was.

  ‘I sent her for you. You can’t be without a woman any more. You’re starting to act strangely.’

  ‘I want to choose a woman myself.’

  ‘She’ll stay until you’ve chosen. And she wants to.’

  Andersson’s reply made him angry. But he didn’t show it.

  For another night he slept in the hammock with the woman beneath him on the floor. The third night he lay down by her side, and after that he spent every night on the floor. She was very warm, with a kind of quiet affection that surprised him, because he had never experienced that with Matilda. She was always serious, kept her eyes closed, and only occasionally touched his back with her hands.

  She seemed to fall asleep at the same moment he had his orgasm.

  Her name was Benikkolua, and he never heard her cry. But she sang almost constantly, when she was cleaning his room, shaking his clothes, and carefully arranging his papers on the desk Andersson had given him.

  He wanted her to teach him her language; not just the distinctive clicking sounds. He would point at various objects and she would pronounce the words. He wrote them down and she laughed when he tried to imitate her.

  Every night he slipped inside her, and wondered who he actually was. To her. Was he committing an outrage or was she there of her own free will? Was Andersson paying her something that he didn’t know about?

  He tried to ask Andersson about it. But he kept repeating that she was there because she wanted to be.

  Andersson’s love life, on the other hand, seemed very complicated. He had a woman in Cape Town who had borne him three children, another family in distant Zanzibar, and several women who at irregular intervals came wandering through the desert to spend one or two nights with him.

  All these women were black, of course. On one occasion as they were eating dinner, Andersson suddenly started talking about being in love with a preacher’s daughter in Vänersborg when he was very young. But he fell silent as abruptly as he had begun.

  The next day he took off into the desert to hunt elephants.

  Nine months passed. Then Bengler finally found his insect. It was an insignificant beetle that he could not identify. Because it had short, possibly undeveloped legs he was not even sure that it was a beetle at first. But he was convinced by the time he stuffed it into his jar and screwed on the lid.

  He had succeeded. He ought to return to Sweden and enter this new discovery in the scientific registers.

  The thought upset him. How could he return? And to what?

  He had found the beetle during an expedition that kept him away from New Vänersborg for two weeks.

  When he returned he found Andersson inside the shop. A wagonload of salt had arrived.

  But there was something else there as well. On the floor stood something that looked like a calf pen. In it lay a boy who stared at him when he leaned forward to take a look.

  CHAPTER 6

  When he saw the boy in the pen it was like looking at himself. Why, he didn’t know. And yet he was sure: the boy who lay there was himself. He cast an enquiring look at Andersson, who was instructing Geijer on how to stack the sacks of salt to avoid the moisture, which in some strange way even reached this remote outpost in the desert.

  ‘What’s this here?’ Bengler asked.

  ‘I got him in trade for a sack of flour.’

  ‘Why is he lying here?’

  ‘I don’t know. He has to be somewhere.’

  Bengler felt himself getting upset. Andersson and his damned salt. When a boy was lying on the bottom of a filthy crate.

  ‘Who would trade a live human being for a sack of dead flour?’

  ‘Some relative. His parents are dead. There was apparently a clan war. Or maybe a feud. Maybe it was the Germans who arranged to hunt down some natives. They often do that. The boy has no one. If I had said no to the trade he would have just disappeared in the sand.’

  ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘Not that I know of. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with him either, so he’ll have to stay here. Just like you. A temporary visitor who ends up staying.’

  Bengler realised at that instant what he had to do. He didn’t need any time to think it over. Now he had found his beetle, he would return to Sweden. The dream of insects no longer excited him, but the boy lying there in the crate, or animal pen, was real.

  ‘I’ll adopt him. I’ll take him with me.’

  For the first time since the conversation began, Andersson was interested. He set down a sack of salt on the planks and looked at Bengler with distaste.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me. I’ll adopt him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There isn’t any “and”. There’s only the future. I’m going home. I’m taking him with me.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘I can give him a life there. Here he will perish. Just as you said.’

  Andersson spat. Instantly Geijer was there, wiping it up with a rag. Bengler recalled with shame how he had once let himself vomit into Geijer’s hands.

  ‘What sort of life do you think you can give him?’

  ‘Something better than this.’

  ‘You think he’ll survive? A journey by sea? The cold in Sweden? The snow and the wind and all the taciturn people? You’re not only crazy, you’re conceited too. Have you found that insect yet?’

  Bengler showed him his jar. ‘A beetle. With peculiar legs. It hasn’t been named.’

  ‘You’re going to kill the boy.’

  ‘On the contrary. Tell me how much you want for him.’

  Andersson smiled. ‘A promise. That some day you come back and tell me what happened to him.’

  Bengler nodded. He promised, without thinking it over.

  ‘I’ll keep the crate,’ said Andersson. ‘You can have the vermin free.’

  He motioned to Geijer to lift the boy out of the pen. He was very small. Bengler guessed that he was eight or nine years old. He squatted down in front of him. When he smiled the boy closed his eyes, as if he wanted to make himself invisible. Bengler decided to give the boy a name. That was the most important thing of all. A person without a name did not exist. He thought first of his own last name. What would go with it?

  ‘You can call him Lazarus,’ suggested Andersson, who had read his thoughts again. ‘Wasn’t he the one who was raised from the dead? Or why not Barabbas? Then he can hang by your side on the cross you nail together for him.’

  Bengler felt like killing Andersson. If he were strong enough. But Andersson would only shake him off like an insect.

  ‘You don’t think Barabbas is a good suggestion?’

  Bengler could feel himself sweating. ‘Barabbas was a thief. We’re talking about giving an abandoned child a name.’

  ‘What does he know about what’s written in the Bible?’

  ‘One day he will know. Then how will I explain why I named him after a thief?’

  Andersson burst out laughing. ‘I believe you mean what you say. That you’ll take the boy across the sea and that he’ll survive. To think that I’ve had such a damned idiot under my roof.’

  ‘I’ll be leaving soon.’

  Andersson threw out his arms as if in a gesture of peace.

  ‘Perhaps I could call him David,’ said Bengler.

  Andersson frowned. ‘I don’t remember him. What did he do?’

  ‘He fought Goliath.’

  Andersson nodded.

  ‘Might be suitable. Because he will have to fight against a Goliath.’

  ‘Joseph,’ Andersson said suddenly. ‘The one who was cast out. Joseph is a fine name.’

  Bengler shook his head. His father’s middle name was Joseph.

  ‘No good.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It brings back unpleasant memories,’ Bengler replied hesitantly.

  Andersson didn’t ask why.

  While they were speaking the boy stood motionless.
Bengler realised that he was waiting for something terrible to happen. He expected to be beaten, maybe killed.

  ‘Did he see what happened to his parents?’

  Andersson shrugged his shoulders. He had returned to the salt. Geijer was balancing at the top of a ladder.

  ‘It’s possible. I didn’t ask much. Why ask about something like that when it’s better not to know? I’ve seen the way the Germans hunt these people the way you hunt rats.’

  Bengler placed his hand on the boy’s head. His body was tense. He still had his eyes shut.

  At that moment Bengler knew.

  The boy would be called Daniel. Daniel who had sat in the lions’ den. That was a fitting name.

  ‘Daniel,’ Bengler said. ‘Daniel Bengler. It sounds like a Jew. But since you’re black you can’t be a Jew. Now you have a name.’

  ‘He’s crawling with lice. And besides, he’s undernourished. Fatten him up and wash him. Otherwise he’ll be dead before you even get to Cape Town. Before he even knows that he’s been given a Christian name.’

  That night Bengler burned the boy’s clothes. He scrubbed him in a wooden tub and put one of his shirts on him that reached to his ankles. Benikkolua was always close by. She had wanted to wash the boy but Bengler wanted to do it himself. That way the boy’s mute fear might subside. So far he hadn’t said a single word. His mouth was closed tight. Even when Bengler wanted to give him food he refused to open it. He thinks that his life will fly away if he opens his lips, Bengler thought.

  He asked Benikkolua to try. But the boy still wouldn’t open his mouth.