A young ship’s boy, barely fifteen years old, had been assigned by Michaux to take care of the five passengers on board. Along on the journey were an elderly bachelor who had terrible smallpox scars on his face, and a very young lady who immediately became the object of the crew’s lustful glances. Except for the fact that the man’s name was Stephen Hartlefield, Bengler knew nothing about him or to what he had devoted his life. Captain Michaux had brusquely informed Bengler that the pockmarked man was an Englishman with cancer in his belly, and he was going home to Devonshire to die.
‘He came to Africa when he was two years old,’ said Michaux. ‘Yet he still talks about travelling home to die in a country that he has no memory of. Englishmen are very strange creatures.’
The young lady, whose name was Sara Dubois, had been visiting one of her sisters who lived on a big farm outside Cape Town. She belonged to a well-to-do merchant family from Rouen and had a chambermaid with her.
The cabin boy’s name was Raul. He was freckled, cross-eyed and alert. Bengler noticed that Daniel watched him for a moment, and caught his eye.
Raul asked why Daniel was being restrained.
‘Otherwise he might jump overboard,’ Bengler answered, feeling despondent about his reply. Something made him feel ashamed that he had to keep a fellow human being tied up. A human being that he regarded as his son.
‘Will he always be tied up?’ Raul asked.
Instead of replying, Bengler called over one of the mates and complained about the cabin boy’s nosy curiosity. The mate boxed him twice on the ears.
Raul didn’t cry, even though the blows were very hard.
They left Cape Town in the evening. Heavy rain clouds swept in over Tafelberg. Bengler had decided to keep Daniel in the cabin as they pulled away from land and not let him out until they were on the high seas. The sea was very calm that night and slow swells bore the ship away from the African continent. Daniel slept in the hammock. Bengler had tied the rope to one of the ceiling beams. Even though it was a low ceiling, Daniel wouldn’t be able to reach the beam and untie it. Bengler had also checked that there were no sharp objects in the cabin that he could use to cut himself loose.
When Bengler placed a blanket over Daniel he discovered that in one hand, which was clenched tightly, he held some sand that he had picked up off the floor.
That first evening Bengler began to sew a sailor’s costume for Daniel. He had procured the cloth from a nautical outfitter recommended by Michaux. Since he had spent all his money on the passage, he bartered for the cloth with the revolver he had bought in Copenhagen. It had also sufficed for buttons, needle and thread. He borrowed scissors from the sailmaker on board. He spread out the cloth on the table in the cabin and then pondered for a long time over how he could actually make a pair of trousers and a sailor’s blouse. It took a while before he dared begin cutting. He had never before in his life made anything like this. The work proceeded slowly, and he pricked himself with the scissors and the needle that he used to sew together the various pieces. Late that night, as he crept up into his hammock next to Daniel, he hid the scissors in a cavity between two timbers up in the ceiling.
Before he went to sleep he lay still and listened to Daniel’s breathing. It was irregular and restless. He felt Daniel’s forehead but could detect no sign of fever. He’s dreaming, he thought. Some day he’ll be able to tell me what he was thinking when we left Cape Town.
The odours from the holds were very strong. In the distance he could hear some of the sailors laughing. Then it was quiet again apart from occasional footsteps on deck and the ship creaking against the swells.
The journey to Le Havre took a little over a month. They went through two storms and were becalmed for six days in between them. The African continent could be glimpsed now and then like an evasive mirage in the east. The heat was relentless. The captain was worried about his cargo of spices and several times went below deck to check that nothing was getting damp.
On the very first day Bengler had decided that Daniel needed a routine. After eating the breakfast that Raul brought in to them, they began taking walks on deck. The man from Devonshire seldom appeared. According to Raul he was in severe pain and ate almost nothing but strong medicines, which left him constantly in a trance-like state. The merchant’s daughter from Rouen played badminton with her chambermaid when the weather permitted. Bengler noticed that the ship then seemed to breathe in a different way. The crew devoutly hoped that the girls’ skirts would blow up and expose a leg or perhaps a bit of their undergarments. During their walks, Bengler talked to Daniel constantly. He pointed and explained and alternated speaking German and Swedish. Slowly he thought he could feel the tension in Daniel begin to relax. He was still somewhere else, with parents who were still alive, far away from Andersson’s pen and the ship that rose and fell, but he’s getting closer, Bengler thought. The further away from Africa, the closer to me.
Bengler realised that he had to show Daniel that the harness was a temporary solution for what he hoped would be an equally temporary problem. The rope situation could only be solved by a growing trust. On the second day aboard, Bengler left the scissors he had borrowed from the sailmaker on the table and let Daniel stay alone in the cabin. He waited outside the closed door, ready for Daniel to cut the rope and then rush out of the door to try to cast himself into the sea.
After half an hour nothing had happened.
When Bengler went into the cabin the scissors lay on the table. Daniel was sitting on the floor drawing with his finger in the sand that still covered the floorboards. Bengler decided to take the harness off the boy. The feeling that he had committed an injustice filled him once again with discomfort. But he also experienced something that could only be vanity. He didn’t want to admit that Wilhelm Andersson was right. That he should not have taken the boy with him. He didn’t want to have his good intentions questioned, even if only by a man he would never meet again. A man who lived in the midst of far-reaching hypocrisy at a remote trading post in the Kalahari Desert.
Bengler went out on deck. The Chansonette was sailing in a light wind. The sails were full. He remembered how it had been when he came to Africa on Robertson’s black schooner, when he had felt masts and sails inside himself. He stood by the railing and looked down at the water. The sails flapped like birds’ wings above his head, a play of sunshine and shadow.
For the first time he seriously asked himself the question: what would he actually do when he got back to Sweden? The beetle with the peculiar legs lay in its jar. And he had Daniel too. In two big leather trunks he had 340 different insects he had collected, prepared and arranged according to Linnaeus’s system. But the question remained unanswered. The thought of returning to Lund was not only repugnant to him, it was impossible. It was tempting to see Matilda again. But it also frightened him, because he was convinced that she had already forgotten him, forgotten their hours of lovemaking, which were never passionate, and the port wine afterwards. He didn’t even know if she was still alive. Maybe she had wound up under Professor Enander’s scalpel too. He didn’t know, and he realised that he didn’t want to know.
The only thing he knew for sure would be waiting for him was the obligatory trip to Hovmantorp to confirm that his father had really died the same night he had the premonition. But then what?