He’d worked up a good sweat by then. But Grandpa wasn’t interested in just scratching the surface … Not by a long shot …
— Lie still! Meir Kahane take me if I can’t make you love me like I deserve!
While Grandpa went to the john to get the mulewhip, I thought of the words Jesus spoke in Sirach: “Bend his neck in youth, bruise his ribs while he is a child …” It looks good on paper, but death ispretty gruesome when it finally comes to call … Grandpa threw himself back on top of me, shrieking in his shrillest shrewvoice:
— You’ll never see Uno Myggan’s monstermember! because I’m going to beat the life out of you!
I cried and begged for mercy, but Grandpa just whipped out his oneeyedsnake, held me down on the table, and started up again … He walloped his heart out, bopped until he burst … I bawled until I was blue, promised to turn over a newleaf … but he was tired of being tired … he lit a Gauloise in the heat of it …
— Hushababy! chin up! simmer down! tickletickle! Not enough? … Here you go! You want some more?! Hooboy! Ubu-roi! Sanssouci! You make me sicker than Nathan Ratschild!
The leather left deep, bloody welts in my flesh … Grandpa beat me where a man keeps his pride, on the ass … the back … the back of my head, too … Wherever he could reach … it was all the same now … thin bloody ribbons of flesh …
— Littleshit! Pissrat! Frogboy! Nilsen! Berkowitz! Begin!
I hollered so it echoed from Mångberge to Storberge! … Grandpa grabbed some coarse brown tape and wrapped it a few times around my neck and mouth … then he continued …
— Dingbat! Hamhand! Klutz! Notail! Goedzak! Mercader!
He waxed into paroxysms and waned into deliriums … Went crazier than Ernst-Hugo … He couldn’t stop … he wasn’t just whistling Dixie … he changed hands because he’s ambidextrous …
— Hornboy! Marbuel! Makbenak! Agnus Dei! I’ll beat the evil out of you! Troglodyte! Trilobite! Starlet! Sweetthingwithacher-ryontop! I got the nigger by the toe! You’ll cry undeunde before I’m done!
Blood sprayed with every lash … shreds of skin dripped, too … it hurt so much I tried to stop breathing … Grandpa threw the whip aside … he’d gone semirigid … come to his senses … tried to rekindle the flame … get himself together … but it had burned down … bled out … he’d lost it … he told himself the same thing had happened to Stendhal … he was indecisive now … frazzlehaired … worndown … upsidedown and insideout … he lay back down on the sofa bed … sang in castrato:
— Nur wer der Minne Macht versagt, nur wer die Liebe Lust verjagt …
Snuffling and tearyeyed, I crept to the john to wash my backside as best I could … I worked the tape loose … bathed in punsch … put soaked vealbrawn and soggy bread on the wounds and wrapped gauze around my lower body … then I undressed and put on my wet nightshirt … I went back into the living room … Grandpa lay there reading The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Flaubert … the TV was still on … Bobby was giving JR a blowjob …
— Listen here, squirt: “The child is little like a dwarf, short, thickset in body with a miserable aspect, some white hair covered his prodigiously great head, and he shivered under a paltry tunic, guarding in his hand a roll of papyrus …” That’s your spitting image, boy! he chuckled. Instead of papyrus, though, you’re guarding a role of toiletpaper!
I knew it was true … I was the most pathetic thing on earth … anyone can have me, but no one wants me … I was ashamed to exist … I received life as a wound and I have forbidden suicide to heal the scar … just like Maldoror … as long as you don’t end up in North Västerbotten when you die … I sat down on the small woven rug … looked at the floor … I ached … that was probably the point … A nature program came on … bloodred, slavetaking brigandants were lapping up a Lomechusa beetles shitdope … the anthill goes down the toilet soon as they get addicted … Grandpa was jacking off … it was the idea that turned him on … insects fondling each other always makes him hot … especially when it involves interspecies action … He joylessly spewed a few wet drops … not long after that he went to sleep … walking through the valley of the shadow of death … I didn’t budge the whole night … I wandered lost … Empty within … cold without … longing for someone to put me out of my misery … Alone in the Milky Way galaxy … I’m so scared … I’m going to crash and burn …
__________
Portello — fruit-flavored soft drink
Ratatoskr — squirrel who scurries up and down Yggdrasil, the World Tree
Zarah Leander — Swedish actress and singer known for her controversial decision to move to Germany and work for the state-owned film studio UFA during the Nazi period
Farah Diba — married name Farah Pahlavi, former empress of Iran
Kamratposten—Swedish magazine for eight to fourteen year olds
Barnjournalen—weekly Swedish television news program for children
Semper — Swedish company that makes baby food
Tusendbröder — Swedish television series
Tschandala — untouchables in the Indian caste system. Also the title of a novella by August Stringberg
Uno “Myggen” Ericson — Swedish journalist, historian, and author
Nathan Ratschild — Nathan Rothschild, a London financier
Nilsen! Berkowitz! Begin! — two mass murderers, one prime minister
Notail — Pelle Svanslös, or “Peter No Tail,” the protagonist of Gösta Knutsson’s series of childrens books
Goedzak — Lamme; Thyl Ulenspiegel’s sidekick
Mercader — Ramón; hacked Trotsky to death
Ernst-Hugo — Ernst-Hugo Järegård, famously temperamental Swedish actor
Marbuel — child-devil in Werner Egk’s ballet Abraxas
Makbenak—“the flesh falls from the bones”; Freemason codeword
Nur wer der Minne Macht …—“Only the one who renounces the power of love, only the one who forswears passion,” from Wagner’s Das Rheingold
Punsch — traditional Swedish liqueur
XVIII
Grandpa had kept his face to the wall for a whole week. He’d just lain there … he hadn’t eaten, drunk, spoken, or slept … He’d just smoked … When I tried to comfort him, he chased me away with a filletknife. It’s how he gets when he goes without drugs. I don’t understand why he torments himself like that. It’s also how he gets when the springsun slits open the curtains and knifes you in the eye. I went outside … slush was melting into drunken rivulets … pockmarked snowdrifts were wasting away in piles of ooze … bare flecks of muddyground were showing through … I flooded a few hectares … I was conducting an experiment … finding out which animals could swim … The sun was a shrill presence, more white than yellow … it didn’t quite have the bite it wanted, though … winter was bowing out, the air was filled with the heady sound of horny birdsong … clumps of snow tumbled from the evergreens, everything was melting except my heart … there the permafrost is perennial … sorrow has frozen the vital-nerve … The sky contained weak strips of blue … they were busy changing the decor …
I went into the kitchen and opened a jar of loveravaged hearts soaked in sweet brine … I put two on a plate and went into the living room … Grandpa was in the same position on the sofa bed … his yichudim were done for … I took my life in my hands and asked him if he wanted a couple of passionbroiled suicidepacthearts … But he didn’t give a shit about what I had to offer … Just lay there, like that Buddha statue in Polonnaruwa … unapproachable … unfathomable … dead to the world … closer to God …