The Listener (8 page)

The damp chill was beginning to creep up her legs. This island was really dreadful, unspeakably sad. It cut her off from everything real and alive. It scared her. Why wasn’t he drawing. Was he waiting for the bear to get up? She said nothing, just tied her scarf around her head and hat and waited.

Finally Mr Shimomura turned to her, and, with a bow and a smile, let her know that now he had finished seeing the bear. They passed a bison and a mink. Behind one of the buildings there were buckets, shovels, and a pair of skis in the trampled snow. There were people who lived and worked out here. But they never saw a soul.

When she finally found the wolves, the island had darkened in the early dusk.

“Mr Shimomura,” she said slowly. She smiled, almost shyly. And showed him the wolves. There were three big cages, with a wolf in each cage. All three walked back and forth along the bars, back and forth in a kind of gliding trot, without lifting their heads. Mr Shimomura went closer and gazed at them.

The wolves’ ceaseless pacing struck her as appalling. It was timeless. They loped back and forth behind their bars week after week and year after year, and if they hate us, she thought, it must be a gigantic hate! She felt cold, suddenly terribly cold, and she started to cry. Her legs hurt, and she wanted to go home. The wolves and Mr Shimomura had simply nothing whatever to do with her.

It was not certain how long Mr Shimomura studied the wolves, but when he walked away the dusk had grown much deeper. She wiped her face with a glove and followed. As they passed the empty monkey house, he turned around and explained everything by laying his hand on his sketchbook, smiling, and nodding his head. He pointed to his forehead to indicate that he had captured the wolf. He had it. She needn’t be the least uneasy.

They walked on up the hill. She followed after him in the resigned, irresponsible calm that follows tears, just walked through the snow and felt that now nothing more could be expected of her.

The outlook tower was locked, but there was a round, open verandah at the bottom, its walls covered with names in pencil and ink. Mr Shimomura brushed snow from the bench and sat down. He put the oddly shaped twigs beside him and sank into immobility. It was now clearly evening. The island below them was dark, but more and more lights were coming on along the half circle of the horizon, and she could hear the city’s continuous dull roar and an ambulance siren that grew steadily fainter and then vanished. Maybe lions don’t roar in the winter, she thought. They’re sitting there somewhere in one of those windowless buildings that maintain the proper temperature. Maybe all the animals are quiet in winter if they live in cages. Her thoughts grew vague. They lingered for a moment on the Japanese giant spider crab that lives so far down on the bottom of the sea that its ten legs aren’t bothered by the waves, and then she drifted into sleep.

She was awakened by Mr Shimomura touching her hand. It was time to go. She was very cold. They walked down the hill and past the pavilion. She didn’t look at the cages and didn’t try to say anything in English. After all, he had his wolf. One day, God knew in what remarkable place, Mr Shimomura would sit down and, with a few obvious, long-considered lines, he would draw a wolf, brutally, sensitively, the most living, breathing wolf that had ever been drawn.

The little motor launch was there to receive them. The driver said nothing.

The only thing I’d like to know, she thought, is which wolf he’ll draw. The one he saw or the one he imagines.

T
HREE MOTORBOATS RUSHED
across the water, their bows abreast. The sun shone and the boats they met waved and assumed they were having a race.

In the middle boat, the broadest of the three, an old woman lay on a litter. The litter was made of an old red deckchair stretched out full length and supported with oars. It was narrow enough to carry through a door.

She lay with her head turned away. Her hair was very white and she seemed suddenly and surprisingly small.

The boats maintained the same speed all the way to the bus pier, where they slowed and beached at the well-trampled landing where the cars and boats of the summer people came and went and where everything was proceeding normally until the ambulance arrived. Then everyone put down their bags and baggage and thought, Dear Lord, right in the midst of vacation, and they took a grip on their children to keep them from running over to look. An old woman in a sunhat bent over and tried to look into the unfamiliar, averted face.
She wasn’t being nosy, she just recognised the situation and said to herself, Poor soul.

In the general store they tried to figure out what might be needed in the ambulance and bought Vichy water, candy, and tissues.

It was hot in the ambulance. The driver knew his stuff. “Do you have any nitro?” he asked. Apparently the people who drive ambulances have to know a lot; maybe they get special training. The attendant who sat beside her just sat there, quiet and serious. He was very young and looked as if really, by natural right, he should have been somewhere else entirely. The road twisted and turned its way through the parched landscape. Once, perhaps, it had been a path, threading its way among houses and boulders and small fields. Then it grew broader, and no one stopped to think that it widened and hardened into a motor road precisely because it had always avoided obstacles.

It was a hot day and there was a thunderstorm that night. The hospital was long and low and a corridor ran through it from one end to the other. It was the darkest time of the night, but no lights were needed now in summer. All the doors stood open, and the people who lived inside them were quiet. Maybe they slept and maybe they listened to the thunder.

It was a beautiful thunderstorm. The architect who built the hospital had included a large balcony at one end of the corridor. From it, one could see the solemn garden with its asphalt paths, black with rain. A few nighttime cars drove past at long intervals. The whole
landscape was filled with the storm’s cold, greenish light, the trees unmoving, like painted scenery in a long and lonely stage perspective. The thunderstorm sailed over the garden, its lightning bolts white and chilly blue, losing themselves in the summer night.

The hospital was near the coast and now, just before dawn, the gulls were screaming above the shoreline. There must have been hundreds of them, all crying, the sound rising and falling, louder than the thunder. For anyone listening, their cries were like panting, like a pulse, a fervour, filling the night.

The gulls went silent when the sun rose, and the rain was brief.

The corridor was so long that it seemed to end in a point of darkness. But the whole length of the corridor glowed with the greenish light that permeated the night outside and flowed in through the open doors.

She loved thunder, but this lovely storm was probably too quiet, it never really reached her.

What is it that cuts across the breathless, brief, and occasional periods of sleep as a very tired human being dies? It cannot be merely the tormented need for more air, for water, or because everything slows and chokes as it rushes towards dissolution, towards the implacable and utterly alien transformation of the body. The old woman was visited by images, events from the life she had lived or dreamed. Everyone was with her, maybe not only those who had loved her and lived with her but also those who had slipped away, the opportunities she’d lost. There is no way to know. We know nothing but try to
find explanations in a smile and a few words that come from far away, from another world, more real than reality.

Death can be a stopping, simply a going quiet. To listen to the sound of breathing for a long, long time, to laborious life fighting to continue, to life forced to continue and to run through tubes and catheters until suddenly none of them are needed and they can all be removed and hung up on their hooks and rolled away on rubber wheels. The one who dies is utterly clean, utterly silent, and then, from the grey mouth, from the altered face, comes a long cry. It is commonly called a rattle, but it is a cry, the exhausted body that has had enough of everything, enough of life and of waiting and enough of all these attempts to continue what is finished, enough of all the encouragement and the anxious fussing, all the loving awkwardness, all the determination not to show pain or frighten those you love. Death in all its variety has a million forms, but it can also be the death of a long and very weary life, a single cry, an articulation of finality, the way an illustrator completes his work with a vignette on the final page.

The thunderstorm gave the parched landscape only a quick shower.

The big rain came several days later. It started raining just before dawn, across the mainland and across the islands. Wells and water barrels filled, there was a rustling and roaring on every roof, and the rain went on and on. The soil was so dry that it was crisscrossed by cracks, and the moss came away from the granite faces in hard plates. Now all the earth, all the moss, all the roots filled with
water. The rain dashed down over the whole countryside in a blessed overabundance, and inside the houses people lay listening and thought, This is good, and then turned over and fell asleep.

N
ORDMAN’S BOY HAD SLOPING
shoulders and large, nervous hands. His wrists were unnaturally slim. He rarely said anything – but then neither did Nordman. The trouble with the boy was that he couldn’t stop working his mouth – a small, uncontrollable mouth that he tried to hide behind his hand. His eyes were much too large – astonishing, huge, Byzantine eyes in an anxious face. He tried to hide them, too, but it wasn’t possible. Every time Nordman went off to do some blasting, the boy stood behind the alders and watched them load the boat. “Aren’t you going to take him along sometime?” Weckström asked, but Nordman thought the boy was too little.

Now, this autumn, they had a blasting job a long way out in the islands. It was windy, and the trips home could eat up a lot of time. What with one thing and another, Nordman decided to do the whole job at once and spend the nights in the coastguard hut on Sandskär. The job could take at least two days, so he decided to take the boy with him so he wouldn’t have to leave him at home alone.

They loaded their gear and got off about eight o’clock, and they ran into heavy seas once they rounded the point. The boy sat at the bow, wearing so much clothing that only his nose showed. He had never been in the motor launch before. Above him, the tarpaulin, fastened to the side rail and the cabin with big clumsy nails, had shaken out of its gussets and hung crookedly the way it always did when the wind blew from the side. A crowbar was rolling back and forth across the deck, and in the middle of the boat, black and clamouring, stood the engine, cobbled together from the parts of several other engines. It laboured there in heat and streaming oil and reeling belts, and from its innards rose a crooked metal pipe that spewed soot over the entire launch.

This machine had a dubious look to it but was actually very dependable, the product of true patience, hard mental effort, and devotion. Nordman had worked at it in the evenings almost all spring.

The seas had grown heavier, and the cardboard box at the stern had disintegrated, leaving small red apples to swim about in the bilge. The shotguns had been firmly stowed in plastic. The boy looked at everything, but all he thought about was the dynamite box, which was even better protected than the shotguns and carefully stowed away near the stern.

Nordman sat amidships, steering, and Weckström sat beside him. They passed long empty beaches, more than usually desolate because of the vacant summer cottages. Behind Herrskär they turned straight south. Then Nordman climbed across the thwarts to his son
and shouted above the engine’s racket, “It’s fifteen tons!” He pointed south. The rock stood out no more distinctly than everything else smudged together on the horizon, but the boy nodded and understood.

“What’s his name?” Weckström shouted when Nordman came back.

“Holger,” Nordman bellowed.

Blasting is a terrible thing to imagine, worse than anything. Someone screams, no words, just a roar, a whoop, and then boots come running, crunching across the gravel, and then a silence that is sick with dread and that grows and bulges and bursts in a great explosion. Thunder booms up out of the earth and the granite rises. Torn free by blaster Nordman, the granite rises towards the sky in dreamlike and terrible slow motion. And then it comes down. Doomsday hulks and razor-sharp splinters, shards like sharks’ teeth or the jaws of saw-toothed, deep-sea monsters – they all rain down for an eternity, and you never know if, quite unnoticed, a blaster’s hand is among them. In this dark image, borne by the wave of detonation, Nordman had flown into the air countless times, though he never knew.

When they arrived at Sandskär, the wind had risen to such an extent that it was just as well to spend the night and get started first thing in the morning. The island had a good harbour. There were no footprints in the sand. Holger followed the men and stood and waited while they found the key and unlocked the hut.

The cabin was very small, very dark inside, and it had an abandoned smell. There were two iron beds with water stains on the mattresses and a stove and a table with a lamp and an oilcloth. Whoever slept there last had cleaned up after themselves, but there wasn’t much wood.

When they’d got the fire started, the men went after the chainsaw. After a while, he heard its high-pitched whine on the other side of the island. It screamed each time it bit off the end of a log, then it was quieter for a while and then it screamed again. A chainsaw goes through an oak plank in six seconds, and it goes through regular wood as if it were butter. When the wood breaks, it gives a jerk and the saw leaps to one side, towards the hand that holds it.

Holger didn’t take off his coat and cap and didn’t give a thought to the fire that was burning out. He was not an enterprising child. He rested his arms on the windowsill and looked at the waves, which were very long and wound around the island so that it was hard to tell which was the windward side and which the lea.

When his mama could still worry about Nordman, she used to sit up and wait and talk about Moses’ Mountain and how wrong it was to split apart what God had joined together. It was only God’s lightning that might cleave asunder, and, when the time arrived, the earth would crack and the graves would open for those who had lived a quiet life and died a natural death.

“You know what will happen,” she said sadly just before she died. Nordman defended himself and said he’d
never suffered from anything more serious than the flu, and then she died, and he went on blasting.

He came into the hut and dropped a load of wood by the stove. He didn’t look at the boy, but there was a hint of impatience in the way he fed the fire. Then he took the pail and went out again.

Nordman and Weckström could do anything. Calmly, continuously, their big boots walked in a world where they altered things and mastered them, put things together and took them apart, killed seals and long-tailed ducks and skinned them and cooked them and ate them and rarely exchanged a word. He was so scared of them, so in awe of them, that there wasn’t the tiniest chance of winning their approval. It was a shame he hadn’t thought to put some wood on the fire. It would have been so easy.

Now Nordman came back with the water bucket and made porridge. Weckström opened the food basket and took out the turnip loaf and some herring. “Go out and play while you’re waiting,” he said.

“He doesn’t play,” Nordman said.

After eating, the men lay down to nap. It was blowing too hard to set out a line for salmon.

A fifteen-ton boulder must be enormous. When you blow it up, does it come apart in the middle like it was struck by
lightning and the halves fall apart like an apple cut in two? Do the fragments fly out of a big hole, or does it split into spiny splinters, slicing knives that whirl through the air and cut off the blaster’s head? What happens if Nordman is dead and his head’s lying in the grass? No one will admire him any more, and no one will be afraid of him.

Holger went out and straight across the island to the launch. It was anchored a little way out, and the plastic dinghy was drawn up on the shore with the chainsaw on its side in the bow. There were clouds in the sky, and he worried about rain. Rain is bad if you’re going to blast. He sat down in the sand and started digging with his hands. Pretty quickly, the hole filled with water. He tried to dig it deeper, but the sides caved in, so he stepped into it with his boots and filled in sand around them. Now he couldn’t move, he was planted in the ground. He was a plant with great long roots and couldn’t move or anything.

The evening was fun. The lamp burned on the table and they ate sausages and potatoes and drank beer. Weckström hung a tarp over the window facing the wind, and the cabin grew warmer and warmer and smaller and smaller. But Nordman and Weckström grew large, so large that they almost reached the ceiling. After supper they did nothing, not even sleep. Their hugeness filled the room with repose and friendliness. Once, Nordman stood up and hammered a nail into the doorjamb. “That’s for your coat and cap,” he said,
and Holger hung them on the nail himself. Pipe smoke covered the whole ceiling. When he got tired, he lay down on the bed that Nordman had made for him. The blanket smelled of motor oil. The engine was not actually as important as he’d thought. It was alone out there on the water, and, as long as it worked, no one worried about it.

Outside, the sea roared and embraced the island and the cabin and all three of them, and by and by it was deep night.

At six o’clock the next morning it was still blowing, but they decided to set off anyway. It was very cold in the hut. He lay rolled up in his blanket and watched the men. The Thermos was on the table, and they drank standing up, put down their cups and started packing. Their huge shadows moved across the walls in the
lamplight
, back and forth.

He got dressed and took his coat and cap from the nail. Weckström took down the tarp and stood for a moment with his hands on the windowsill, looking at the weather. It was still dark, and there was no let-up in the roar of the waves.

When they stepped outside, the door blew open and banged against the wall. It was lighter outdoors, a thick grey twilight in which the men were the darkest shapes. He followed them down to the shore and stood and waited while they got the dinghy into the water.