He suddenly had the feeling that he was in the very centre of the world. Right in the middle of something that for the first time in his life was completely real. Something that demanded he take a stand, have an opinion, make a choice.
He got no further with his thoughts. He noticed that the real reason why he had woken up was violent nausea. He leaned over the side of his hammock to throw up. The black man stopped fanning and cupped his hands to catch the vomit. Bengler didn’t manage to turn away. He sensed a kind of love in the fact that an unknown man in a folk costume from Västergötland accepted his spew in his cupped hands. He knew that his conclusion was wrong, that he would eventually change it, but right now he believed it was love. It was a mercy to be able to throw up into another person’s hands.
Exhausted, he sank back on the pillow. The black man wiped his face. Andersson was still out there somewhere bawling his hymn, which seemed to have an unlimited number of verses. Or was he repeating them? Or singing the hymn in different languages? Even though Bengler was very tired, very close to dropping off to sleep, he tried to listen. Then he realised that Andersson wasn’t singing the proper text. He was filling the verses of the hymn with his own words. He yelled at somebody named Lukas, who was supposed to have fixed a fence long ago. Then he sang about a raft that he once built on Lake Vänern, but soon returned to cursing Lukas, and Bengler realised that Andersson was either insane or drunk.
And yet he felt utterly safe.
He had survived in spite of everything. He had arrived somewhere. The magnet had loosened its grip. He had arrived at an unknown point where there were people, a bit of Sweden, something he could recognise.
He woke himself in the dark because he was snoring.
But when he opened his eyes the snoring continued. Andersson was asleep, rolled up in a zebra pelt next to a burning whale-oil lamp. Bengler crept carefully out of his hammock to take a piss. He fumbled his way in the dark towards a door or a curtain, and, without actually noticing how it happened, he found himself outside. In the distance some fires were burning. People were talking in low voices, shadows flickered, a baby cried softly. He shuddered from the sudden cold and the night wind. Then he took a piss. As usual he wrote some numbers with his stream of urine. This time a four and a nine. He finished half of an eight. Then he was done.
When he came in Andersson was awake. He sat wiping off soot from the glass of the whale-oil lamp.
‘While you were sleeping I tried to figure out who you were. I went through the load on your wagon. All I found was a number of books and plates of insects and some jars with worms and beetles in them. That was all. It’s like having a visit from a travelling insane asylum. Many people have passed through here, but none as crazy as you.’
He left the lamp alone and lit a pipe.
‘In your catechism I read that you were from Hovmantorp. I looked on my old map of Sweden, but I couldn’t find it. Either you’re lying when you write in your notebooks, or Hovmantorp is an unknown place, even though it surprises me that there are still blank spots in a country like Sweden.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘That’s not a very precise question. Where is here? In the desert? In Africa? Or in this room?’
‘In Africa.’
‘Nineteen years. It amazes me every day that I’m still alive. It also astonishes all the blacks around me. It astonishes the oxen and the ostriches and perhaps even the wild dogs. But sometimes I think maybe I’m already dead. Without having noticed it.’
He picked up a bottle of beer and took a drink.
‘If you hadn’t lanced that boil I probably would have died. If it gives you any satisfaction, I would gladly say that you came through the desert like a gentle saviour and saved my life.’
‘I was supposed to become a physician, but I wasn’t good enough.’
‘It’s common for Europeans who weren’t good enough to come to Africa. Here they can assert their skin colour and their god. Don’t have to be able to do anything, or want anything. Here you can live well by forcing people into submission. Illiterates from Germany come here and suddenly they’re the bosses of a hundred Africans whom they believe they are entitled to treat any way they like. East of this desert the Englishmen are doing the same thing; north of us sit the Portuguese, singing their sentimental songs and whipping the hide off their black workers. We export our skills to America. Those who come to Africa are either revivalist preachers or lazy brutes. And I’m neither a preacher nor a brute.’
‘What are you?’
‘I have foresight. I make deals.’
‘I met a man in Cape Town named Wackman. He spoke of the importance of realising that the piano will create great fortunes in the future.’
‘Exactly. For once that man is right. Wackman is a vile person. He slashes the soles of his whores’ feet so they’ll never forget him. His real passion is small boys with light brown skin. He rubs them with oil. Rumour has it that on one occasion, after having mounted such a lad, he found it so wonderful that he set fire to the boy. The oil made the boy burn very quickly.’
Bengler tried to assess whether Andersson was as cynical as he made out. How deep had the night cold and the loneliness actually penetrated him? Were there only frozen spaces inside, feelings embedded in blocks of ice, the same way that his beetles were drowned in alcohol? Or was there also something else?
‘I was searching for another focus in my life,’ Andersson said. ‘My father was a pharmacist and thought I ought to exhibit the same passion for liniment that he did. But I was born with a hatred of all salves. So I left. Stowed away on a wagon taking Lidköping porcelain to Gothenburg. And from there out into the world. Until I drifted ashore here. I went home one time, to bury my father. I arrived six months after he died, but they had left a hole in the ground so I could toss a little dirt on the coffin. Although I actually gave him desert sand. That was when I brought back the folk costume for Geijer.’
‘Is his name Geijer?’
‘I’ve forgotten his real name, but I christened him Geijer. A fine name. A clever fellow who wrote some poems that I still remember. Is he still alive?’
‘Erik Gustaf Geijer is dead.’
‘Everybody’s dead.’
‘You’re living in the middle of a desert.’
‘I hunt. I have the only trading post where the blacks are allowed inside. No Germans come here. They hate me the same way I hate them, because they know that I can see straight through them: their brutality, their fear.’
‘You hunt elephants?’
‘Nothing else. What were you thinking of putting in your empty glass jars?’
‘I’m going to catalogue insects. Systematise and name them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it hasn’t been done yet.’
Andersson looked at him for a long time before he replied.
‘That’s an answer I mistrust. Doing something just because it hasn’t been done yet.’
‘It’s the only answer I have.’
Andersson lay down and pulled a cover over himself.
‘You can stay here. I need company. Somebody to eat with, someone to lance my boils.’
‘I can’t pay you much.’
‘Company is enough.’
He stayed in the place that Andersson had named New Vänersborg. At the back of the room where he spent his first night there was another room where Andersson stored his elephant tusks. This room was emptied and cleaned, and he moved in. The ox-drivers were dismissed, the animals were slaughtered, and Andersson helped him find new draught animals and ox-drivers, although Bengler had a feeling that Andersson was using them to spy on him. Andersson knew everything he thought, all the plans he had. He also suspected Andersson of reading his diaries and rummaging through his clothing. They ate dinner and talked in the evenings. But now and then Andersson would withdraw with his bottles of beer when a very beautiful black woman came to visit. That’s when Bengler would feel a fierce desire for Matilda. He resumed his habit of masturbating two or three times a day.