What I was most pleased about, though, was that my entire former existence seemed as if blown away. When the constant intercourse with others no longer interposed itself between me and the world, I could evaluate my life in terms that weren’t sullied by emotion, and in that way arrive at something solid. And then I understood that the human was just what I wanted to get away from. Not other people as such, but that whole flora of feelings that welled up in me when I was with them. Emotions were what had made me so soft and indistinct, so weak and pliant, so blushingly young girlish, they were to blame for all the misery in my life. Ever since I was small and could cry and cry over the smallest thing, sensitivity had got in my way. All that damned talk of mine, when I never quite knew where to draw the line, and therefore let it flow out in all directions, all that damned desire to make everyone happy, when I would go to any length to be liked, as if my character were a rubber band, all those damned humiliations I’d so willingly subjected myself to, all those doglike evasions and all that spineless fawning and ass-licking I’d spent years at, where had it gotten me?
I’d been so deeply mired in an emotional morass of shame and contempt, self-pity and small, piss-tepid streams of pleasure, that I’d never even suspected just how ignominious this existence was. I saw the world from within it, that was why it appeared so small and insignificant, while I, enveloped in the gloom of my thoughts, had turned into something mushroomy, something soft and slimy that had puffed up grotesquely. I was everything; the world was nothing. Of course this didn’t mean that I liked myself, on the contrary, I was filled with hate for myself and everything about me, but what was this hate, though, other than a new way of embracing myself? Because there was a satisfaction in it, oddly enough. A kind of sweetness. During that first week on the island, despair could drive me out into the evening darkness, where nothing had anything to do with me now, cold and inhospitable, the landscape thrust me away from it, I was totally alone and jogged furiously up the grassy hill as my eyes gradually accustomed themselves to the darkness. The worst thing wasn’t that I found myself out here on my own, nor that I’d wrung the last few drops of meaning out of my existence, the worst thing was that I wasn’t able to conceive of another life. Either I had to come to terms with it, or I had to bring it to a conclusion. The latter thought awakened something resembling joy inside me. It would be so easy. But my pleasure was nothing more than a species of my childhood’s self-pity, and when I realized that, already lulled by its sweet warmth, something contemptible came over that thought as well. Not even my despondency had any depth. I wasn’t standing on the edge of an abyss, I was standing before yet another argument: shall I take my own life to prove to myself that my despair is genuine? What sort of ludicrous suicide would that be? And what kind of epitaph would it spawn?
HENRIK VANKEL
1970–1998
DIED TO PROVE TO HIMSELF
THAT HIS FEELINGS WERE GENUINE
I got no further. As I went on across the island, as the breakers were pounded to whiteness against the mountain beneath me and the light from the lighthouse swept soundlessly through the darkness, I knew that it would never happen, for no matter how meaningless my life was, no matter how despicable I might seem in the eyes of others, I would never give up, but would always cling to the only thing inside myself that I really could depend on when all else failed. Because I was managing, I was staying afloat, I was happy with myself.
Wasn’t I?
Yes, I was. Not even the most minute examination of my life could shake the core inside me: will. It was unquenchable. Sometimes, when I found myself in one of these situations where there was complete silence around me, I thought that others could hear it too. A quiet, continuous hum of something that just burned and burned.
I flicked my cigarette down the hill, picked up my fishing rod, and continued down. On clear days you could see the clusters of islands and holms over toward the mountain chain in the east, but now the mist closed all that off. It was as if the sea itself had risen, I thought, and finally, diluted with air, had made its claim on the landscape it had coveted for so long. In the flat rocks below me the surplus water, which had filled up the many pools during the night, trickled down cracks and grooves in the ragged rock. The barrenness of the surroundings together with the mist gave the colors at the bottom of these pools a peculiar intensity: in one place rust red, another shining green, another urine yellow with salty white stains, and above them all hovered a myriad of insects, as small and dry as flower spores.
I crouched and carefully let myself down the ten feet to the shelf-like ledge from where I normally fished, took off my pack, got out the reel, assembled the rod and attached a spinner to the swivel, raised the rod above my head, and cast, looking out the whole time. The sight of the sea filled me with an elated, almost feverish feeling of well-being. Along the entire western side of the island the breakers beat against the skerries, spuming white shards of water that crashed slowly through the air. The waves in the sound before me were faster, with a craquelure of foam and fizzing eddies as they struck land. Each time they receded they left the kelp-covered rock bare, and the hissing sound made it seem as though it had come up to breathe for a brief moment before again diving into the breakers. Then the spinner came speeding through the water. It clinked against the rock beneath me, I reeled it fully in and cast again, this time in the other direction, without getting a bite. Although I was perfectly happy, I changed spinners, mainly because it made me feel that I knew what I was doing.
I only noticed the ship when I turned to put the spinner in my pack. The holm behind which it lay hid almost the entire hull. Only the radar and the top part of the bridge were visible.
So that was where the inflatable had come from, I thought. A warship on exercises. It was nothing to worry about, but there was something in the ship’s presence that wasn’t good.
No, not good.
I cast a few times, but the thought of the ship lying there ruined the serenity that fishing normally gave, and after a while I decided to go across to the other side of the island, where hopefully I’d be able to fish undisturbed.
I packed up and moved off. At the top of a small hummock I turned and looked back at the ship. There wasn’t a soul to be seen onboard. Perhaps it was the lack of people, perhaps it was its shining gray color, perhaps it was the numbers painted on the hull. But I couldn’t fish with it near.
I couldn’t even on the other side of the spit of land, with a fifteen-foot-high wall of rock behind me. I gathered my equipment together again and walked along the shore all the way to the southern side.
There I was comfortable.
I was very fond of fishing. For a few hours there was nothing but the weight of the rod in my hands, the droplets of salt water that now and then caught my face, the whirring sound of the reel, the sight of the mountains in the east, their appearance altering hour by hour, according to the light that fell on them, the feeling the open country gave of being closer to the sky. All the same, I was an abysmal fisherman. My line was always getting tangled, and after a lot of bother it usually ended with me having to cut it loose; the spinner was forever catching on the bottom, and after hauling on the line from every possible direction, I frequently had to employ the same tactic there. The hooks caught in my hands, which were full of little cuts and grazes; I had no control over my casts, which were just as likely to end up on the knoll to my left or the rocks behind me as in the sea in front, and every once in a while these sudden movements would make me overbalance and slip on the treacherous sea rocks. In the beginning this clumsiness had made me uncomfortable; with burning cheeks I would look around all the time to check that no one was watching me, and when I packed up my things and started back, it felt as if I’d just come out of a house full of loud and clamorous people. But the lantern of loneliness is a strong and bright one, and gradually these shadows, too, gave way before it. The only unpleasantness that then remained was killing the fish I hauled up. I had never managed to learn how to break their necks, and instead had to bang their heads on the rocks until no signs of life remained, which for some reason I grew less and less inclined to do the longer I lived out there. At the same time I disliked my own increasing squeamishness, there was something pathetic in having scruples about killing a fish, and this made me bang their heads even more violently against the rocks.