A fishing boat took him to Copenhagen. For three weeks he lived in a cheap boarding house with sailors in Nyhavn. One Sunday he went to watch a beheading. He didn’t go to the theatre or visit the museums. He talked to the sailors and waited. He had reduced his baggage to a minimum; everything was contained in a simple chest he had found in the attic of the building on Prästgatan. He had packed up his maps, colour plates and books, some shirts, a pair of extra trousers, leather boots. In Copenhagen he had bought a revolver and ammunition. That was all. He changed the money he had left into gold. He carried it in a leather pouch inside his shirt.
He also had his hair cut very short and started to grow a beard. And he waited.
On 23 May he found out that an English schooner, the Fox, would be sailing from Helsingør to Cardiff and then on to Cape Town. The same day he left his boarding house and took the post coach north to Helsingør. He paid a visit to the captain of the black-painted schooner and obtained a promise to be accepted on board as a passenger, although there would be no private cabin at his disposal. For the passage he paid about half the contents of his leather pouch.
On the evening of 25 May the Fox left Helsingør. He stood by the railing and sensed everything making headway within him. Inside his breastbone he had masts that were raising their sails. Something was pulling at him, as if a line had been lashed around his heart. He was seized by a desire to be a child again, just for a moment. To skip, babble, crawl, learn to walk right there on the scoured deck.
That night he slept heavily.
By dawn the next morning they had already passed Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark and were in another world.
That world was covered by a thick and immovable fog.
CHAPTER 2
On the ship he was liberated from his name. He was never called anything but ‘the Passenger’. Without knowing how it happened, he underwent a ritual in which he was stripped of his former identity and became the Passenger. Among these pale but hard-working men he was the only one who did nothing but travel. Without a name, without a past, with nothing more than a bunk in the crew’s quarters. And that was fine with him. When he lost his identity, the past disappeared. It was as though the salt water that splashed up over the railing penetrated his consciousness and corroded all the shadowy memories he carried. The sound of his father’s grinding jaws ebbed away, Matilda became an indistinct silhouette and the house in Hovmantorp a ruin. Of his mother and two sisters nothing was left, not even the memory of their voices. When he was transformed into the Passenger he discovered for the first time that something existed which he had heard of but never before comprehended: freedom.
He would always remember the arrival in Cape Town as an extended and surreal dream. Or perhaps it was actually the end of one nightmare that imperceptibly slipped over into another? Even before they reached Cardiff, the captain, whose name was Robertson, had turned out to suffer from recurrent bouts of madness. He would come rushing into the crew’s quarters with knives in his hands, slashing wildly in all directions. They had to tie him down; only when he began weeping some days later would they release him again. Bengler understood that the crew had great love for the captain. The schooner was actually a floating cathedral with a number of acolytes who were prepared to follow their master into death. Between his attacks, Robertson was very amiable and devoted both interest and time to his lone, taciturn passenger. He was in his forties and had gone to sea when he was nine. At sixteen he underwent a religious crisis, and then, when he became captain, shouldered an invisible mantle which was actually a pastor’s robe and not a marine uniform. He told his passenger about many oddities from the African continent. But he had never visited the desert. He assumed an absent, almost sorrowful expression when the Passenger told him about his plans. He didn’t reveal his deepest secret, about the mysterious butterfly or fly he would name after himself. But he did talk about the insects, how he was going to catalogue, sort, identify and carry out the arrangements that were necessary for a person to be able to live a decent life.
The talk about the desert, the expanses of sand, made Robertson depressed.
‘You can’t even drown in sand,’ said Robertson.
‘But you can be covered up by it,’ replied the Passenger.
Robertson observed him for a long time before he made another comment.
‘No one has ever seen a god arise from a grain of sand. On the other hand, the Devil has been known to spew burning sand from his maw.’
The Passenger didn’t mention the sand again. Instead he enticed Robertson to tell him about the black people, the very short and the very tall, about the women who smeared dung in their hair, the violent dances that were nothing more than shadow images of erotic games. And the Passenger listened. Every evening, except during a heavy storm in the Bay of Biscay, he noted down what the captain had said. After he helped Robertson clean out a severely infected ear, their relationship had deepened. As a special favour, as if he were being allowed to take part in a holy sacrament, Robertson had taught him to use the sextant. The feeling that he was carrying the ship inside him rather than standing on its deck became ever stronger. Each morning he raised his inner sails, depending on the direction and force of the winds. In the evenings, or when a storm was brewing, he watched the crew clambering up the rigging and took the same measures inside himself.
On 22 June just at sundown, the lookout shouted, ‘Land, ho!’ Robertson let the vessel lie at drift-anchor that night. In the crew’s quarters a strange silence prevailed, as if none of them dared believe that they had survived yet another journey to the distant dark continent. In low voices, as if they were confiding secrets to one another, they began to plan for the days they would spend ashore. He listened attentively to the whispers passing through the cabin. It was like a chant in which two things were murmured time after time: women and beer, women and beer. Nothing more. The last night on the ship he tried to reconcile his thoughts with all that he had left behind, but he could not even recall Matilda’s face. There was nothing.
At dawn he took leave of Robertson.
‘We’ll never see each other again,’ said Robertson. ‘I can always tell when I’m saying goodbye to someone for the last time.’
It was as though Robertson were issuing his death warrant. It upset him because it made him fearful. Could Robertson see what lay before him, see into the unknown? He refused to believe that this was true, but Robertson was one of the most mysterious men he had ever met. What was he really? A mad preacher or a mad sea captain? Or a man who actually had the ability to discern the men for whom death was already waiting?
‘Good luck,’ said Robertson, stretching out his hand. ‘Everyone has his path to follow. And that cannot be altered.’
Then he was rowed ashore. Tafelberg loomed high like a decapitated neck over the city that lay wedged at the foot of the mountain. On the quay there was great confusion; people yelled and shoved, some black men with rings in their ears began to tear at his chest and he was forced to defend himself with his fists. He spoke German, but nobody understood him; all around him English was being spoken. Robertson had given him two addresses, one for a boarding house which was usually free of lice, and one for an old English pilot who for some reason was the honorary consul for the Union of Sweden and Norway in Cape Town. When, after numerous difficulties, he found his way to the boarding house, he was drenched with sweat. The white woman who owned the establishment yelled at a fat mulatto and told her to give the new guest some water. He drank it, knowing that something was going to happen to his stomach. He was shown to a room where the sheet was ironed yet still wet. Everything seemed damp, the floorboards had pores, and he lay down on the bed and thought: Now I’m here and I have absolutely no idea where I am.
The next day, after he had succumbed to the first bout of diarrhoea, he looked up the Swedish-Norwegian honorary consul. This gentleman lived in a white house next to a road that climbed towards the mountains. He was admitted to the house by a
black man with no teeth, and he sat waiting for two hours on a wooden chair until Consul Wackman had finished snoring and got up and dressed. Wackman was completely bald, had no eyebrows, and his protruding ears reminded Bengler of swallows’ wings. His legs were short, his stomach held up by a piece of Indian fabric, and on his bare chest sat two bloodsucking leeches. He glanced over the letter that Robertson had written and then tossed it aside.
‘All these Swedish madmen. Why do they always have to come here? What we need are engineers. Competent people who can solve practical problems, or have raw strength, or a little capital. But not all these madmen who either want to import revival or collect the dung that the elephants leave behind. And now this. Insects. Who needs flies and mosquitoes in catalogues?’
With his fat fingers he grabbed a small silver bell and rang it. A black servant, naked except for a thin loincloth, came in and knelt down.
‘What would you like to drink?’ Wackman asked. ‘Gin or not gin?’
‘Gin.’
The black man disappeared from the room. Outside the window Bengler could see that someone had hung up a vulture by its feet and was beating it with a wooden stick.
They drank.
‘I had thought about making a living from ostriches,’ said the Passenger, who was now slowly feeling his name returning. He was again on his way to becoming Hans Bengler from Hovmantorp.
Wackman regarded him for a long time before he replied.
‘So, you’re a madman,’ he said at last. ‘You think you’re going to hunt ostriches and export feathers for ladies’ hats. It won’t pay. The feathers will rot before the ship has even left the harbour.’
With that, all discussion was over. Wackman did, however, exhibit a certain resigned kindness and promised to help him acquire some oxen, a wagon, and hire some ox-drivers. Then he would have to manage on his own. Wackman thought it would be advisable if he left a will with him, in case there was something to be inherited. Or at least the address of a family member who could be informed that his relative’s bones were now resting in an unknown location in an endless desert.
They kept on drinking gin. He thought about the mellow port wine he had drunk with Matilda. That world now seemed like an enigmatic mirage. Now it was raw gin tearing at his throat. And Wackman, breathless, as if he would give up the ghost at any time, told him the strange story of how he, who was born in Glasgow, had wound up in Cape Town and came to be the owner of a brothel and represent the Swedish-Norwegian Union.
The story was about bears and a lithograph that he had once seen in his younger days in the window of a bookseller’s in Glasgow. Bear Hunting in Swedish Wermland. He had never been able to forget that image. In his twenties he had made his pilgrimage, arriving in Karlstad in the middle of a terrible winter. Several times he had almost died from the terror that the cold aroused in him, not the cold itself. He never saw a live bear, even though he stayed in that awful cold for more than two months. On the other hand, he did see a bear skin at the home of a retired artillery captain who lived by the square. Then he had left Sweden as fast as he could, and by a circuitous route ended up in Cape Town, where he wanted to show his gratitude for seeing the bear skin by taking on the task of serving as the consul of the Swedish-Norwegian Union.
By late afternoon they were both fairly well intoxicated. Wackman ordered his carriage and together they rolled down the steep road and stopped outside the low cement building that housed his brothel. Half-naked black women melted into the darkness in the low rooms and there was a strong smell of unknown spices. Wackman vanished and Bengler suddenly discovered that he was entwined with black snakes: female arms, legs, feet, bellies, and he fled into the gin fog and didn’t know whether it was actually Robertson’s schooner that slowly sank towards the bottom of the sea, or the ship he carried inside himself.
The next day he awoke on the floor of a room with a veil beside his head. When he forced himself to stand up he discovered a blue spider which was busy weaving its web in the corner between two walls. He reminded himself of his mission and walked through the brothel, where everyone now seemed to be asleep, and found Wackman passed out in an antique rocking chair. Although Wackman was sleeping deeply, he seemed to have been waiting for him. When Bengler stood behind him he awoke with a start.
‘I need nine days,’ Wackman said. ‘And all the cash or all the gold dust you have in that pouch that’s bulging under your shirt, which by the way is filthy and should be washed. Nine days, no more. Then you can be on your way. And I will never see you again. But there is one piece of advice I would give you. Advice about the future.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The pianoforte.’
‘The pianoforte?’
‘It’s all the rage in England. It will spread over the entire continent. Those young mamselles play the piano. Black and white keys. Those pianos need keys. And the keys need ivory.’
Bengler understood. Wackman thought that he ought to go in for elephant hunting.
‘I came here for the tiny creatures,’ he replied. ‘Not the big ones.’
‘Blame yourself and die,’ said Wackman. ‘No one will miss you, no one will remember you.’
But Wackman, whose first name was Erasmus, kept his promise. On the ninth day everything was ready. For lack of anything better, Bengler had left Wackman the address of the housekeeper in Hovmantorp. In the event that he died, she would stuff the letter between his father’s grinding jaws and the last memory of him would be eradicated.
And yet he knew this would not happen. Without being able to explain it, not to mention defend it, he was convinced he would survive.
The sand would not sneak up on him.
On one of the first days in July he set off from Cape Town.
The sluggish oxen moved very slowly. He had purchased a tropical helmet and hung a rifle over his shoulder. Insects buzzed around his face, lured by his sweat. He thought that they would lead him in the right direction. They were his most important travelling companions.
The compass, which had been made in London and was encased in brass, showed that his course was due north, perhaps with a deviation of a few hundredths of a degree to the west.
The first night he changed his clothes before he sat down to eat the dinner served by Amos, his cook. They had made camp by the bank of a small river. The starry sky was clear and close. Suddenly he saw the Big Dipper. It hung upside down. As a last farewell to everything he had left behind, he surprised his ox-drivers by standing on his head and looking at the Big Dipper as he had seen it as a child.
They thought he was praying to a god.
For a long time he lay awake and waited for a beast of prey to roar in the night.
But everything was very quiet.
CHAPTER 3
The next day, during the hottest hour of the day when the sun hung straight over his head, the fear came.
At first it was a creeping anxiety. A premonition which he initially dismissed by thinking it was something he had eaten. Or that he had forgotten something, a thought that glided past unnoticed, and he didn’t realise was important. This uneasiness or anxiety was light. The fear came later. It was heavy and pulled at him like a powerful magnet.
They had stopped at the edge of some flat country where low bushes lay blanched in the sun. Neka had set up a parasol and placed his folding chair on a little rug. They had eaten rice, vegetables and a strong spicy bread which according to Wackman was the only kind that did not get mouldy during long expeditions. Amos, Neka and the other two ox-drivers, whose names he hadn’t yet learned, lay sleeping under the wagon. The three oxen stood motionless. Their skin twitched when insects bit them.
It was in that instant the dry earth was transformed into iron. The magnet pulled and he felt the fear coming. He had just taken out his diary to make notes about the morning’s events. He had decided to write three times a day: when he awoke, after the midday rest and before he went to sleep. Since he could not imagine keeping these notes
only for his own sake, he had decided that the person he would direct his words to was Matilda. The fear came just as he had finished his account of the morning. They had struck the tent at sunrise. At nine o’clock they passed a dry riverbed where he had identified the skeleton of a crocodile. He calculated the length as three metres and ten centimetres. Just after ten o’clock they passed an area of dense, thorny thickets that made the oxen restless. Before they stopped for their midday rest, he had seen a large bird hovering motionless above his head, as if resting on an invisible pillar. Whether it was an eagle or a vulture he could not tell. After these practical matters he had added, The feeling is very strong. From Hovmantorp I have come all the way here. I realise that the road is endless and life is very short. That was when the fear came. At first he wondered what was causing it. He no longer had diarrhoea, his pulse was normal, he had no infections. There didn’t seem to be any threats: no beasts of prey, no hostile inhabitants. Everything was actually quite idyllic. Motionless oxen, men sleeping under a wagon.
It’s about me, he thought as he wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. It’s about me sitting here in the midst of an unreal idyll. He suddenly thought he saw Professor Enander before him and heard his words: We shall be cutting up a cadaver that was a cadaver even in life.
He thought about how he had fainted and that it had been his way of fleeing. To escape seeing how the belly would be slit open and the guts spill out. Now he sat in the middle of a strange place in the southern part of Africa, on his way to an unknown goal: a previously unnamed, uncatalogued, and unidentified fly, or perhaps a butterfly.