In January 2014 Henning Mankell was informed that he had cancer. However, Quicksand is not a book about death and destruction, but about what it means to be human. He writes about love and jealousy, about courage and fear. And about what it is like to live with a potentially fatal illness.
This book is also about why the cave painters 40,000 years ago chose the very darkest places for their fascinating pictures. And about the dreadful troll that we are trying to lock away inside the bedrock of a Swedish mountain for the next 100,000 years.
It is a book about how humanity has lived and continues to live, and about how Henning lived his own life.
And, not least, about the great zest for life which came back when he managed to drag himself out of the quicksand that threatened to suck him down into the abyss.
EARLY IN THE morning of 16 December 2013 Eva drove me to the Statoil depot in Kungsbacka, where I collected the car I had hired. I was going to drive to Vallåkra, just outside Landskrona, and back. The car was due to be returned that same evening. The following day I would be busy signing copies of my latest novel in bookshops in Gothenburg and Kungsbacka as part of the pre-Christmas publicity programme.
The wintry morning was freezing cold, but there was no rain or snow. The drive would take me three hours if I stopped for breakfast on the outskirts of Varberg, as was my wont.
The head of my theatre in Maputo – Manuela Soeiro, with whom I had now been working for thirty years – was visiting Sweden. This was to be the first real meeting concerning the production we were planning to stage the following autumn. Manuela was staying with Eyvind, who was going to direct the version of Hamlet I had been thinking about virtually all the years I had been working at the Teatro Avenida.
It had struck me very early on that Hamlet was ideal for adapting as a drama about an African king – the fact is that something very similar to the plot of Hamlet actually took place in a part of southern Africa in the nineteenth century. My idea was that at the end of the play when everybody is dead and Fortinbras comes onstage, he would be the white man who arrives to start colonising Africa on a serious scale. I therefore thought it would be logical to allow Fortinbras to conclude the play with the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy.
If you are going to perform Hamlet, you must have an actor who can play the part in the way you envisage it – and now we had just the man. Jorginho would be able to do it. He had developed significantly over the last few years, and he was also then best of all the actors when it came to the way he approached the language. It was a case of now or never.
As I drove through Halland I found myself looking forward to the coming day. I was filled with great expectations.
The roads further south were dry, although it was very cloudy and overcast. I wasn’t driving all that fast, unusually for me – I had given them an arrival time and I didn’t want to get there too early.
Then suddenly it all happens very quickly. Just north of Laholm I pull out into the outside lane in order to overtake a slow-moving lorry. Somewhere on the road surface is a patch of something, possibly oil: I start skidding and lose control, the car crashes head-on into the central barrier and the airbags inflate. I black out for a second or two.
When I come to, I sit there in silence for a while. What has happened? I feel around to make sure I am still in one piece. I’m not injured, I’m not bleeding. Then I get out. Cars have stopped and people are running towards me. I tell them I’m OK, I’m not hurt.
I stand on the verge and telephone Eva. When she answers I make a point of trying to sound calm.
‘You can hear that it’s me,’ I say. ‘And that I’m all right.’
‘What’s happened?’ she asks immediately.
I tell her about the accident. I play down the crash, and insist that all is well. I don’t really know what’s going to happen next, but I’m fine. I don’t know if she believes me.
Then I telephone Vallåkra.
‘I’m afraid I shan’t be coming,’ I say. ‘I’ve crashed into the central barrier on the road just outside Laholm. I’m not injured. But the car’s a total write-off.’
The police arrive. I blow into their bag but I’m completely sober. I describe the accident. While all this is happening the fire brigade tows away the car, presumably to the scrapheap. An ambulance driver asks if I want a lift to A & E just to be on the safe side. I say no as I am not in any pain at all.
The police drive me to the railway station in Laholm; half an hour later I’m on a train back to Gothenburg.
I still haven’t been to Vallåkra, and I never did the book signings there.
Without really knowing why, I date my cancer to that very day: 16 December 2013. There is no logic in doing so, of course. My tumours and metastases must have been growing for some considerable time. Nor did I have any symptoms or other indications on that particular day.
It was more of a warning. Something was happening.
A week later, just before Christmas, Eva and I went to our little flat in Antibes, on the Mediterranean coast. In the morning of Christmas Eve I was woken up by pains in my neck and a general feeling of stiffness. I thought I must have been stupid enough to lie in an awkward position and given myself a twisted neck – what the doctors call torticollis.
But the pain didn’t go away. Instead, it spread quickly down my right arm. I lost all feeling in the thumb of my right hand. And it hurt. In the end I rang an orthopaedic specialist in Stockholm I was lucky enough to get hold of despite the fact that almost everybody was on holiday for Christmas. I went back to Sweden and he examined me on 28 December. He thought it could well be early signs of a slipped disc at the top of my spine, but of course it was not possible to say without a scan, which we agreed I should have as soon as the Christmas holidays were over.
The 8th of January dawned. It was a cold morning, and snowing lightly. I thought it was high time to get the slipped disc diagnosis confirmed. I was still suffering severe neck pains. Strong painkillers helped, but that was only a stopgap measure. The slipped disc needed proper treatment.
Early in the morning I had two scans. Two hours later the torticollis and slipped disc theory had changed into a cancer diagnosis. I was shown a computer image of a cancerous tumour, three centimetres in diameter, in my left lung. And there was a metastasis in my neck. That was the cause of my pain.
The diagnosis was very clear: it was serious, possibly incurable. I asked hesitantly if that meant I should go home and wait for the end.
‘Not long ago that would have been our advice,’ said the doctor. ‘But now we have treatment options.’
Eva was with me at the Sophiahem when I was informed of the situation. Afterwards, as we stood outside in the cold winter weather waiting for a taxi, we didn’t have much to say. We probably didn’t say anything at all, in fact.
But I saw a little girl jumping up and down in a snowdrift, full of joy and energy.
I saw myself, as a child, jumping around in the snow. Now I was sixty-five years old and had been diagnosed with cancer. I was not jumping around.
It was as if Eva had read my thoughts. She took a firm grip of my arm.
As we drove away in the taxi the little girl was still jumping up and down in her snowdrift.
Today, as I write this on 18 June, one could say that the time that has passed since then was both lengthy and short.
I am unable to write a full stop – neither after a fatal outcome nor a declaration that I am healthy again. I am in the middle of something. There is no conclusion as yet.
But this is what I have been through and what I have experienced. The story does not have an ending. It is ongoing.
That is what this book is about. My life. What has been, and what is.
TWO DAYS AFTER the car crash I paid a visit to Släp church, which is close to where I live on the coast, just north of Kungsbacka. I suddenly felt an urge to see a painting I had observed and admired many times. A painting like no other.
It is a family portrait. Years before photography was invented, people with sufficient means used to commission oil paintings. This picture depicts the vicar Gustaf Fredrik Hjortberg and his wife Anna Helena and their children – all fifteen of them. The picture was painted at the beginning of the 1770s when Gustaf Hjortberg was in his fifties. He died a few years later, in 1776.
It is possible that he was the person who introduced potatoes into Sweden on a serious scale.
What is striking and remarkable about the picture, and perhaps also frightening, is that it doesn’t only depict the individuals who were alive when the artist Jonas Durchs started work on the project: he also painted the children who were already dead. Their brief visit to this earth was over, but it was felt they should be in the family portrait even so.
The picture is constructed in a way that was normal at the time: the boys – both the living and the dead – are gathered around their father on the left of the picture, while the girls are standing around their mother on the right.
Those who are alive are looking at the observer – there are quite a lot of modest, perhaps shy smiles. But the dead children’s faces are half averted from the observer, or partly hidden behind the backs of the living. All that is visible of one of the dead boys is his forehead and one eye. He gives the impression of trying desperately to make his presence felt.
In a cradle beside the mother is a small child, half hidden. Girls are hovering vaguely in the background. There seem to be six dead children in all.
It is as if time has stood still in the painting. Just as is the case in a photograph.
Gustaf Hjortberg was one of Linnaeus’s disciples, although he was never outstanding in any way. He made at least three voyages with the East India Company to China as the ship’s chaplain. Also depicted in the painting is a globe of the world, and a lemur. Hjortberg is holding a sheet of paper in his hand, covered in writing. We are in the presence of an educated and sophisticated family. Gustaf Hjortberg lived and died in accordance with the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. He also had a reputation of being well versed in medicine – people went on pilgrimages to Släp in order to receive advice and be healed.
It is about 250 years since these people lived and died. Eight or nine generations, no more. In many ways they are our contemporaries. And above all, they belong to the same civilisation as those of us who contemplate the painting.
Everybody in the picture is smiling. Some a little stiffly, others introspectively, a few are quite uninhibited and close to me as I scrutinise the picture.
But needless to say, what one remembers about the painting is the children who are half hidden or looking away. The dead. It is as if they are in motion, moving away from the observer and into the world of shadows.
What is so touching is the reluctance of the dead children to disappear.
I know of no other picture that depicts so vividly the stubborn determination of life to continue.
I hope this painting will survive into the future – a future so far distant that I am incapable of imagining it – as a greeting from our civilisation. It combines a belief in reason with the tragic conditions that are inherent in human life.
Everything is there.
IN THE EMOTIONAL chaos that enveloped me after my torticollis had metamorphosed into cancer, I noticed that my memory often transported me back to my childhood.
But it wasn’t long before I realised that my memory was trying to help me to understand, to create a starting point that would enable me to cope with the potentially fatal catastrophe with which I had been stricken.
I quite simply had to start somewhere. I had to make a choice. And I was becoming increasingly convinced that the beginning lay somewhere in my early life.
I eventually chose a cold winter’s day in 1957.
When I open my eyes that morning I am unaware that the day is going to reveal a big secret.
Quite early I am on my way to school through the darkness. I am nine years old. It so happens that my best friend Bosse is ill. I always pick him up from his house, which is only a few minutes’ walk from the district courthouse where I live. His brother Göran answers the door and says that Bosse has a sore throat and will be staying at home. I will have to go the rest of the way to school on my own that morning.
Sveg is quite a small town. None of the streets are very long. Although fifty-seven years have passed since that winter’s day I can still remember everything in great detail. The few lights suspended on cables across the streets are swaying gently in the gusty breeze. The shade on the light outside the ironmonger’s has cracked – it wasn’t like that yesterday. Evidently it had happened during the night.
It must have been snowing while I was asleep. Somebody has already cleared away the snow from outside the furniture shop – that must have been Inga-Britt’s dad. He owns the furniture shop. Inga-Britt is another classmate of mine, but she’s a girl and we never go to school together. But she can run very fast. Nobody can ever keep up with her.
I can even remember what I had dreamt about that night. I’m standing on an ice floe on the River Ljusnan, which flows past the building where I live. The spring thaw has begun and the floe is floating southwards. Standing on one’s own on an ice floe ought to be scary as it is very dangerous. Only a few months ago a boy just a few years older than I am drowned when an unexpected and treacherous hole in the ice opened up in a lake just outside Sveg. He was dragged down and his body has never been found, despite the best efforts of the fire brigade. His teacher drew a cross on his desk at school. It is still there. Everybody in his class is frightened of holes in the ice and accidents and ghosts. Everybody is scared of that unknown thing called Death. The cross on his desk is a source of terror.
But in my dream the ice floe is safe. I know I’m not going to fall into the water.
I cross the road just past the furniture shop and stop outside the community centre. There are two display panels outside. The cinema changes its programme twice a week, and the films are delivered in brown cardboard boxes from the goods depot at the local railway station. They come either from Orsa to the south or from Östersund. And they are still brought from the station by horse and cart. Engman, who is the caretaker at the community centre, lifts the boxes from the cart. I tried once, but failed miserably: they were too heavy for a nine-year-old. The cardboard boxes contained a bad cowboy film that I eventually watched. It was one of those B-movies where people talk and talk, with a brief gunfight at the end. Practically nothing else happens. And the colours are so peculiar. The people often have pink faces and the sky is more green than blue.
I see from the posters that Engman will be showing The Hard Man, which doesn’t sound all that attractive, and a Swedish film starring Nils Poppe. The only advantage of the latter is that it is a U certificate and children are allowed in. That means I won’t have to crawl in through the basement window that Bosse and I have a secret key for, so that we can always get in that way when the films are adults only.
As I stand there that freezing-cold morning fifty-seven years ago I experience one of those vital moments that will affect the rest of my life. I recall the situation in minute detail, as if the images have been branded into my memory. I am suddenly possessed by unexpected insight. It is as if somebody has given me a good shaking. The words come into my head of their own accord.
‘I am myself and no one else. I am me.’
At that moment I find my identity. Until then my thoughts had been childish, as they were meant to be. Now the situation was entirely different. Identity is necessary in order to develop awareness. I am myself and nobody else. I cannot be exchanged for anybody else. Life has suddenly become a serious matter.
I don’t know how long I stood there in the freezing-cold darkness, possessed by this new and bewildering understanding. All I remember is that I arrived late for school. Miss Prestjan, my teacher, was already playing the harmonium when I opened the outside door. I hung up my jacket and waited. It was strictly forbidden to go clomping into the classroom once morning prayers and hymns had begun.
It came to an end at last, there was a clattering of desks, and I knocked on the door and went it. As I was hardly ever late Miss Prestjan simply gave me a searching look and nodded. If she had suspected laziness, she would have said something.
‘Bosse is ill,’ I said. ‘He has a sore throat and a temperature. He won’t be coming to school today.’
Then I sat down at my desk. I looked around. Nobody had the slightest idea about the secret I was carrying with me. The secret I would keep for the next fifty-seven years.
IT SUDDENLY SEEMED as if my life had shrunk. That January morning when I received my cancer diagnosis, I had the feeling that my life was dwindling away. Very few thoughts came into my head; my mind seemed to be a sort of desert-like landscape.
Perhaps I didn’t dare to think about the future – it was so uncertain, a veritable minefield. Instead, I kept returning again and again to my childhood.
When I was eight or nine years old I passed through a period in which I kept thinking about what kind of death frightened me most of all. That is nothing remarkable – people have such thoughts at that age. Life and death begin to be serious topics that one needs to come to terms with. Children are extremely serious creatures. Not least when they reach the age when they slowly take the step that changes them into conscious human beings – conscious of the fact that they have an identity that cannot be changed. Over the years what one looks like in a mirror changes, but behind that mirror image is always the real you.
Your identity is formed when you decide your attitude towards serious questions. That is something known to everybody who has not forgotten all about their childhood.
What frightened me more than anything else was falling through the ice on a lake or a river and being sucked underneath the ice sheet, unable to break through to the surface. To drown just underneath the ice through which you could see the sun shining. Suffocating in the cold water. Being overcome by panic from which no one could rescue you. Screaming without being heard. Screams that froze and turned into ice and death.
That kind of fear was not so strange; I grew up in the province of Härjedalen where the winters were long and severe.
Around that time, a girl about my age actually did fall through the all-too-thin ice on the Sandtjärn lake. I was there when they recovered her body. The word had spread very fast through Sveg. Everybody came running up. It was a Sunday. Her parents were standing next to the lake where the black water in the hole stood out among all the whiteness of the ice and snow. When the volunteer firemen had dragged out the girl with their grappling irons, her parents didn’t react as they would have done in a film or a book. They didn’t burst into tears. They were completely silent. It was others who wept. Her teacher, I recall. The vicar and the girl’s closest friends.
Somebody vomited into the snow. It was very quiet. The white clouds of breath coming out of everybody’s mouths were like incomprehensible smoke signals.
The drowned girl had not been in the water all that long. But she was completely stiff. Her woollen clothes crackled and creaked as they laid her down in the snow. Her face was absolutely white, as if it had been made up in that colour. Her blonde hair stuck out from under her red cap like yellow icicles.
But there was another kind of death that terrified me. I had read about it somewhere. Looking back, I have tried to remember where. Possibly in Record Magazine, which combined fictional tales about sport with thrillers and adventure stories. Or perhaps it was in some travelogue from Africa or the Arab countries. I have never managed to find it.
It was about quicksand. About how a man in a khaki uniform, with a rifle over his shoulder, dressed for an expedition, happens to tread on the treacherous sand and is immediately stuck fast. He is sucked inexorably further and further down, totally unable to break free until the sand begins to cover his mouth and his nose. The man is doomed. He suffocates and eventually the last glimpse of his hair-covered scalp disappears under the sand.
The quicksand was alive. The grains transmuted into ghastly tentacles that devoured a human being. A flesh-eating sand hole.
I was able to avoid treacherous ice floes, and there was not much in the way of sandy beaches by the lakes or the River Ljusnan. But many years later, when I was wandering around in the sand dunes at Skagen, or later still on African beaches, the memory of that quicksand cropped up inside my head.
When I was told I had cancer, that same feeling of terror burst out inside me again.
What I felt was precisely that fear of quicksand. I fought against being sucked down and swallowed up by it. By the totally paralysing realisation that I had been stricken by a serious, incurable disease. It took me ten days and nights, with very few hours of sleep, to keep myself afloat and not be incapacitated by the fear that threatened to overcome all my powers of resistance.
I can’t remember being afflicted by desperation so great that I burst into tears. Nor that I screamed out loud in despair. It was a silent battle to overcome the quicksand.
And I wasn’t sucked down totally. In the end I was able to crawl back out of the sand and begin to come to terms with what had happened. I no longer thought in terms of lying down and waiting for death to come. I would accept the treatment that was now available today. Even if I would never be completely cured, there was a possibility that I could live for quite a long while yet.
Being stricken by cancer is an extreme catastrophe. It is only after some time that you know if you are going to be able to handle it, to resist it. I am still not clear about what I thought and experienced during those ten days after I had received that catastrophic diagnosis. Perhaps I never shall be? Those ten days at the beginning of 2014, after Twelfth Night, are shadowy, as dark as the Swedish midwinter. I was occasionally subjected to attacks of the shivers – reminiscent of the occasions when I was stricken with malaria. I spent most of the time lying in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin.
The only thing I am quite clear about is being convinced that time had stood still. As if in a concentrated and condensed universe, everything had become a point in which there was no past or future: nothing but now. I was a human being clinging fast to the edge of a patch of death-bringing quicksand.
When I had finally conquered the urge to give up, to allow myself to be swallowed up into the abyss, I read some books about what quicksand actually is. And I discovered that the story of sand that can suck down and swallow up a human being is in fact a myth. All the stories describing it are inventions. Among other authorities, a university in Holland has conducted practical experiments to prove the point.
Nevertheless, the comparison with quicksand is still the one I acknowledge today. That is what the ten days that completely changed the circumstances of my life were like.
THE FIRST TIME I heard the word ‘Onkalo’ was in the autumn of 2012. At that time, of course, I had no idea that I would be diagnosed with cancer within a couple of years.
‘Onkalo’ is Finnish and means cavity or cavern. The word can also be used about something magically mysterious, as in ‘the troll lives in the caverns of the mountains’.
By sheer coincidence, while travelling on a train from Gothenburg to Stockholm I found myself reading a newspaper article about work to dig tunnels and very deep caves in the Finnish mountains, in which nuclear waste would be stored more or less for ever – at the very least for 100,000 years. Even if the radioactive waste is at its most dangerous – most lethal – during the first thousand years, there must be a guarantee that it will be stored safely for 3,000 generations to come.
I have lived with atomic power for the whole of my life. Even from my childhood I have vague memories of protests and the fear of atomic weapons, and of a devastating war between the Soviet Union and the USA which were two wild animals, only just kept apart and only occasionally at peace with each other. Then came nuclear power, the accident at Three Mile Island, followed by Chernobyl and, most recently, by Fukushima. I am convinced that there is already a clock ticking down to the next nuclear disaster. I question the validity of nuclear power. Every accident, or report that a catastrophe has only narrowly been avoided, has made me more negatively disposed. Naturally I have been aware of how slowly the radioactivity breaks down, and how dangerous the waste is that we shall be forced to live with for thousands of years. But it was only on that autumn day two years ago that it actually dawned on me what the real significance of it all was.
The newspaper article was tucked away on an inside page. Other news – about the love life of a rock star, how to avoid paying tax without breaking the law or how to lose X kilos within a fortnight – seemed to be much more important.
I have no difficulty in understanding that, of course. Life is lived in the here and now. People are seldom able to extend their curiosity beyond the next few days, or months, or years. Or perhaps it would be truer to say they focus only on the next lottery draw, or some other game that they hope to win, in order to wave goodbye to all their obligations and emigrate to some paradise in the Caribbean or Asia.
Nowadays people in our part of the world no longer believe in God. They believe in scratch cards and other games of chance. There is no end to all the scratching and gambling. If you have the combined skill and good luck to win a large sum of money, you have killed the goose that lays the golden egg. You don’t need to work any more, you don’t need to worry about anything: you can treat society with arrogant contempt.
It seems to me typical that the kind of financial rewards available for winning these days demonstrates this attitude very clearly. In some games, you can win a fixed monthly wage – already taxed, of course – for twenty-five years, or even longer.
Nevertheless, tucked away in that newspaper was an article about a hiding place in the Finnish mountains called Onkalo where nuclear waste will be stored for vast lengths of time.
A few days after that train journey I wrote to Onkalo and asked for permission to visit them. I received a swift response saying that I would not be welcome. The letter informed me that they did not want their premises to be used as the location for a thriller. I sent an angry reply saying that such a project had never occurred to me. If I had an opinion about what they were doing, it was a philosophical one. How is it possible to store potentially lethal waste for 100,000 years, bearing in mind that the oldest buildings raised by humans that are still standing are 5,000 to 6,000 years old? How is it possible to guarantee something that nobody living today will be able to check?
I received another reply saying that they had decided not to accept visitors because they could not guarantee people’s safety in the caves and tunnels. Needless to say, I found this frightening, but amusing at the same time – how could they not guarantee the safety of a single visitor and yet maintain that the waste would still be there in the incomprehensibly distant future, long after I and the director who replied to my letter had died and rotted away in our graves?
It was clear that I would never be able to visit Onkalo. But similar work was taking place in Sweden. Just outside the town of Oskarshamn.
I had visited that town several times when I was eighteen. That was long before any nuclear power stations at all had been built in Sweden, and long before the question of taking care of the waste had become a problem for the government and Swedish citizens.
I wrote to the nuclear power station in Oskarshamn, and was told that I would be welcome to visit them. A few months later I did so.
Now, when I am living with my cancer, I think I have acquired new and unexpected perspectives on the way in which we handle nuclear waste.
VIKTOR SUNDSTRÖM WAS a self-taught engineer who was married to my aunt. He became a friend of mine when I was a young man because, despite his age – he lived until he was about ninety-five – he was still a political rebel. He never tired of complaining about the terrible conditions in which the poor people in his home province of Värmland had been forced to live at the end of the nineteenth century.
He once tried to explain the universe to me. At that time, in the middle of the 1950s, the Big Bang theory had not been accepted by all scientists as an explanation of the origins of the universe. Viktor maintained that the universe had always existed. When I asked what had existed before that, his answer was that there was no ‘before’.
That was impossible to understand, of course. The whole of my childish image of the world collapsed. I recall vaguely that Viktor realised he had made me insecure and perhaps also afraid when he robbed me of that ‘before’.
‘Nobody knows for certain,’ he said by way of consolation. ‘The universe is a mystery.’
He didn’t believe in God. He approved of the fact that my father had forbidden us to go anywhere near any kind of Sunday school. He never went to church except when he felt obliged to attend a funeral. He was completely indifferent to what would happen to his own body after his death.
For me God was something big and frightening. An invisible being who slunk along by my side and could read my thoughts. I gathered that neither Viktor nor my father believed that this invisible God had created the earth and other planets and stars. For some years this resulted in a feeling of insecurity inside me. I found it unsatisfactory for a universe and all its stars glistening in the cold winter nights to be one vast mystery.
There had to be something else. There had to be a ‘before’.
Even if I had tried I would have been unable in those days to imagine an expanse of time in the future 100,000 years long. I still can’t do it. I can see the mathematics, I can count the generations, but even so I don’t understand it. How is it possible for a human being to imagine a comprehensible world in such a distant future? How could I imagine a descendant of mine 3,000 generations ahead? The future gets lost in the same kind of mist as when we look back in time. We are surrounded by fog, or perhaps compact darkness, whichever way we turn. We can send out our thoughts in all directions and all dimensions of time, but the replies we receive are not worth much. We are unable to penetrate what not even science-fiction writers manage to depict all that satisfactorily.
Researchers can use mathematical models to calculate everything from when the universe was first created to the day when the sun will expand so much that it swallows up our earth, long after all the oceans have evaporated and all life has ceased to exist. In the end, the life-giving sun will be our death. Like a gigantic fire-breathing dragon it will swallow up the earth and then become one of the cold, dead dwarf stars. But the mathematical models do not make the passage of time any more comprehensible.
There are other ways of approaching the impossible task of trying to imagine a world hundreds of thousands of years ahead of our present day. This is one of them:
Several years ago I asked a good friend of mine who is a glass-blower by profession to make me a glass containing an air bubble. Such a glass would normally be a blunder by a competent and self-respecting glass-blower, and be thrown away without a second thought. But I was interested in the difference between truth and falsehood, between myth and reality. In the back of my mind was also the question of time and eternity.
There is a myth that says that a bubble trapped inside the transparent wall of a glass moves. This happens so slowly that it is impossible to detect movement simply by looking at it – even during the course of a long lifetime the bubble would not appear to have moved at all in any direction – it would take more than a million years for it to return to its starting point. In other words, the bubble has an orbit, just as the planets move in accordance with a set pattern and at set speeds.
Harry Martinson has written impressively about this in his outstanding space epic Aniara. However, if we postulate that this is not a myth but is actually fact, we are faced with another problem: how can we possibly check it? Nobody holding that glass in his or her hand today is going to exist in a million years’ time. Thousands of generations of human beings cannot report on exact memories of what their eyes have seen during thousands of years. We cannot possibly know for sure if the movement of a bubble of air through glass is true or false, myth or verifiable truth.
Needless to say, scientists can create a model and conduct experiments, but that can only give us an indication of probability, never an indisputable truth.
Trying to see 100,000 years into the future is a compromise between what we can imagine on the basis of factual knowledge and what our fantasy and imagination aided by mystical experiences might indicate.
A human being is a creature that has been evolving for thousands of years, developing more and more appropriately practical abilities. We would hardly have been equipped with the enormous creative capacity that comes from fantasy and imagination had it not been for the need to survive, to protect our children and to find new ways of obtaining food when normal conditions become chaotic as a result of drought, floods, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
The history of mankind, like that of all other living beings on this earth, is based ultimately on the creation of survival strategies. Nothing else is of real importance. This ability enables us to reproduce, and to pass on to new generations ways of handling exactly the same problems of survival that we have faced up to ourselves.
Life is the art of surviving. Nothing else.
The glass containing the bubble of air is still standing on a shelf in my home. If nobody knocks it over so that it falls and shatters, it will still be there long after I have passed away.
And I believe that bubble will move. But I shall not see it doing so.
ONE DAY, IN the spring of 2013, I write my last will and testament. There are still seven months to go before I start feeling pain in my neck, and I have no physical or mental indications that such problems might be in store. I am not ill, and do not suspect that death might be already standing in the porch, waiting to come in.
The reason I write my will is quite different.
When my father died many years ago he had left detailed instructions about what should be done with his belongings after his death. This meant that my siblings and I never needed to worry about what he would have wanted. Which bundles of letters should be burnt? Which should be kept, and even read? What should happen to his furniture and books? Was there anybody who should receive a legacy? It was easy for us to sort and distribute his estate, and then devote ourselves to the much more important matter of mourning his passing.
Writing one’s will is to acknowledge one’s mortality. To some extent, of course, one does it for highly egotistical reasons – but mostly, I think, it is to make things easier for those left behind.
Once you are dead, you are dead. You can no longer influence earthly things. Being alive is being able to say yes or no. Being dead is to be surrounded by silence.
When did human beings start writing wills? When they began to own things that could be of value to those left behind, of course. Owning things in accordance with the law brings with it the need for a written statement of what should happen to those items after the owner’s death.
No doubt most people think they ought to write a will – but they never get round to it, apart perhaps from a few sketchy points in a notebook. They keep putting it off. In many cases it is probably due to a naive superstition: they are afraid that writing a will might entice death, and encourage him to come immediately and collect them. For others it may well be a feeling that there is no big rush: they are still young, after all. There’s plenty of time left in which to do it.
People create the greatest of all illusions: if I die. Not when I die.
But suddenly they are killed in a road accident. Or they are stricken with aggressive cancer, and all thoughts of making a will simply disappear. Fighting to survive takes up all their energies.
Civilisation leaves no wills behind. That is something only individual human beings do. Neither the Mayans nor the Incas, the Egypt of the Pharaohs nor the Roman Empire, vanished at a stroke. The decline came slowly and stealthily, and was ignored for as long as possible. It was simply unthinkable for such a dominant civilisation to collapse. The gods were a guarantee for that. As long as you made sacrifices to them, followed the advice and demands of the priests or shamans, you belonged to a civilisation that would last for ever. That seems to be a characteristic common to all great and classical civilisations: they seemed immortal to those who lived in them.
A striking example of a culture that collapsed is the one that faded away on Easter Island. Today Rapa Nui, as it is called in Polynesian, is a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. It is completely without trees. Scattered around in the undulating grass-covered landscape are gigantic sculptures of the former civilisation’s gods. Ever since Easter Island was discovered on Easter Day in 1722 by the crew of a Dutch ship commanded by Captain Jacob Roggeveen, people have been astonished by these sculptures. Some have fallen, others are still standing, precisely where they were once dragged into place and raised. But most remarkable of all are the quarries where the statues were originally carved out. There are several half-finished statues still lying there, including one that would have been bigger than all the rest.
It is an unfinished god, not sufficiently complete to be transported – with enormous effort and brilliant contemporary engineering skill – to the place where the priests had decided it should be raised.
The quarries on Easter Island are a sort of cemetery for dead gods that were never actually used. The quarry workers suddenly abandoned their half-finished works of art.
Did somebody compel them to stop work? Or did they do so of their own accord? Did they flee in a sudden attack of panic? Did their belief in what the gods represented suddenly fail them? Nobody knows for certain.
Nevertheless, today it is possible to establish with a fair degree of confidence what caused that rich culture to collapse. Or at least the alternatives can be reduced to a small number.
A significant number of researchers believe that the people who originally colonised the island brought with them – presumably unintentionally – rats, which had no natural enemies on the island. As a result the rats multiplied dramatically and were able to live on seeds from the palm trees that were widespread on the island at that time.
Easter Island had been populated by people from the Pacific Ocean archipelago, who undertook long voyages to the isolated island. The forests were presumably one of the assets that induced the sailors to stay on the island. Many researchers suggest that the ravaging of the forests eventually led to the collapse of the civilisation that developed on the island over some 400 years because the inhabitants were no longer able to support themselves. Without trees it was impossible to build boats to use for fishing or, towards the desperate end, to travel away from the island, perhaps back to the coasts from which they had originally come. The forests had been stripped bare in order to provide fuel, but also to create wooden rollers to transport the gods to the places where they would be raised and worshipped. The soil that had previously been used for growing food blew away without the tree roots to keep it in place on the rocky ground. And of course the rats ate all the seeds, so that the trees could not reproduce themselves.
We do not know what happened during the last years of the Easter Island civilisation. There are no written records. But wooden sculptures that have been discovered suggest that the inhabitants starved to death. The carved figures depict emaciated, hungry people. Their protruding rib bones are as significant as their facial expressions.
The struggle to find food might well have led to fights between various groups. It is not difficult to envisage the social chaos, the religious despair and the brutality into which people descend when there is only enough food for a minority.
Nobody wrote a will, of course. Neither a personal document nor one that could be a source of information enabling us to understand what was happening during that final period before Easter Island became as deserted as it had once been. What the last inhabitants left for us to interpret was a silent warning. The deserted island, the overturned or unfinished statues were the nearest they came to leaving a will. Confirmation that in the end, even the most advanced cultures decline and disappear.
There are no last wishes left behind by the cultures and civilisations that preceded our own time. By means of archaeology, palaeontology and other aspects of research, and with the aid of increasingly sophisticated technical aids such as microscopes and telescopes, we can dig deeper and further back in time and understand more about the past.
But two concepts sum up all that has been discovered, and probably all that will ever be discovered: survival and extinction.
By examining the world in a rear-view mirror, as it were, we can see what we are also heading towards. Naturally, nothing will be exactly the same – history never repeats itself as a mere imitation.
But in our case we can say that we have already established what will be the ultimate record of our civilisation.
Not Rubens. Not Rembrandt. Not Raphael.
Not even Shakespeare or Botticelli, Beethoven, Bach or the Beatles.
We are leaving something completely different behind. When every other aspect of our civilisation is dead and gone, two things will remain: the spaceship Voyager on its never-ending journey through space and the nuclear waste hidden away in the mountain caverns.
ONE EVENING I am sitting at home, thinking about how the illness known as cancer entered my life.
When I was nine years old I developed a pain in my stomach that was so bad that I was taken into Sveg’s little hospital. The doctors suspected that I had appendicitis and would need an operation. I didn’t, in fact. The pain eased and the consultant, whose name was Stenholm and who frightened everybody he came into contact with, concluded that I had merely got a little fluid in my appendix that gradually dried up and disappeared of its own accord.
But I was kept in a general ward for three days. At the far end next to the window was a large man with thin hair and a pot belly. He had cancer. On the left side of his bulging stomach was a festering, purulent sore. The wound was dressed every morning and every evening, and the bloodstained, pus-soaked bandages were thrown into a tin bucket and taken away. I gathered from the patients in beds closest to him that the wound gave off a very unpleasant smell. Once, when he had gone to the toilet, I heard people whispering about the wound being cancerous: the whole of his stomach was being eaten away by tumours, and one had forced its way out of his stomach and through his skin.
Nobody said as much in so many words, but even a nine-year-old like me realised that the man was dying. He was a horse dealer and used to buy and sell Northern Swedish horses, and occasionally also Ardennes from Belgium. I think his name was Svante, and his surname might have been Wiberg – or was it Wallén? But I know for a fact that he bought and sold horses.
Nobody came to visit him during the days I spent on the ward. When he wasn’t lying immobile in his bed, he used to stand in front of one of the tall windows. He would stand there in his ill-fitting nightshirt, his belly hanging awkwardly and his hands behind his back, staring out of the window like a policeman on patrol. It often seemed as if he stood there for hours on end.
The day I was discharged I went over to the window to see what it was he had been looking at.
The window overlooked the hospital mortuary – a small, whitewashed building lying alongside a shed for storing rubbish and an old abandoned stable. Perhaps he once used to keep his horses there? By the time I left the hospital I knew that cancer was something with a nasty smell, and it produced bloodstained and pus-soaked bandages. It had absolutely nothing to do with my own life apart from being a distant threat hidden away in the general ward of an insignificant hospital in the north of Sweden.
I remain sitting there in my flat in the darkness. It is half past four in the morning. Another memory has just cropped up inside my head. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I had taken it down from a shelf inside the archives of my memory. I start thinking about something that happened exactly twenty-one years ago.
I remember very clearly the last cigarette I ever smoked. I smoked it just outside the entrance doors to Johannesburg International Airport. In December 1992 it was still called the Jan Smuts Airport. A few years later, when the apartheid system had disappeared once and for all into the rubbish dump of history, it was renamed after the heroic freedom fighter Oliver Tambo.
I had been wandering around in Maputo for a month, feeling more and more out of sorts. For a long time I thought I was suffering from some persistent virus, or an attack of malaria that had not yet come to a head. I was busy rehearsing a new play at the theatre. Every afternoon when I got into my old Renault I had to force myself to start the engine. Tiredness was beginning to feel crippling, irrespective of how long I slept.
One day I pulled up outside the theatre and switched off the engine. But I didn’t have the strength to get out of the car. I gave up. I shouted for the theatre’s stage manager Alfredo, who was standing outside the entrance, putting up a poster.
‘I don’t feel well,’ I said. ‘Tell the actors they can have a reading day today.’
I drove back home and fell asleep as soon as I lay down on the bed. In the evening I went out to buy some food. In the shop I happened to bump into Elisabeth, a Swedish doctor and a friend of mine. She looked me up and down.
‘You’re all yellow,’ she said.
‘Am I?’
‘Yellow all over. Come and see me tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock.’
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.