His father was a shadow and had never been anything else. And yet Bengler visited him in in Hovmantorp that summer to obtain his blessing. He had a vague hope that his father would be able to give him a little financial support for the expedition he was planning.
In addition, and this was the most important thing, he knew that it was time to say goodbye. His father would soon be gone.
From Växjö he got a lift from a travelling salesman who was going to Lessebo. The wagon was uncomfortable, the road was bad, and there was a strong smell of mould from the salesman’s coat. He was indeed wearing a fur coat even though it was early June — not full summer heat yet, but already warm.
‘Hovmantorp,’ he said after an hour had passed. ‘A fine-sounding name. But there’s nothing there.’
Then they introduced themselves. That never would have happened when they met the night before, as he went round the inns in the little town looking for a ride.
‘Hans Bengler.’
The travelling salesman pondered for several kilometres before he replied.
‘That doesn’t sound Swedish,’ he said. ‘But what is Swedish anyway, other than endless roads through equally endless forests? My name isn’t Swedish either. It’s Puttmansson, Natanael Puttmansson, and belongs to the chosen yet exiled people. I sell brushes and household remedies for barrenness and gout.’
‘There’s some Walloon in my lineage,’ replied Hans Bengler. ‘A bit of French. There’s a Huguenot in the family too, and a Finn. And a French cavalry captain who served under Napoleon and took a shot through the forehead at Austerlitz. But my name is genuine.’
They rattled on further. A lake glittered among the trees. He’s certainly not talkative, Bengler thought. Big forests either make people silent or make them talk incessantly. I’m thankful that this salesman who smells like mould is a man who keeps his mouth shut.
Then the horse died.
It stopped in its tracks, tried to rear up as though it had suddenly encountered an invisible enemy, and then collapsed. The salesman didn’t seem surprised.
‘Swindled,’ he said simply. ‘Someone sells me a horse under false pretences, and the only thing I’ve never learned to judge is horses.’
They parted ways without much ado. Bengler took his knapsack and walked the last ten kilometres to Hovmantorp. Since he was a man devoted to insects, he stopped now and then to study various creeping things, preparing himself to see his father. Just before he reached Hovmantorp it started to rain. He crept into a barn and masturbated for a while as he thought about Matilda, who was his whore and worked in a brothel just north of the cathedral. It was several hours before the rainstorm passed. He sat looking at the dark sky while his member dried off, thinking that the clouds looked like a caravan, and he wondered how it would be to live in a desert where rain almost never fell.
Why had he decided on the desert, anyway?
He didn’t know. When he was studying the maps his first thought was of South America. But the mountain ranges frightened him, since he didn’t like being up high. He had never even dared climb the tower of the cathedral to look out over the fields. It made him dizzy just thinking of it. The choice came down to the great steppes in the realm of the Mongolians, the deserts of Arabia or the white spot in south-west Africa. His final decision had something to do with German. He spoke German since he had hiked the country with a friend several years earlier. They had made it all the way down to the Tyrol. Then his travelling companion suddenly contracted a fever and died after violent attacks of vomiting, and Bengler hurriedly returned home. But he had learned German.
As he sat there in the barn with his member in his hand, he thought that he was actually an apprentice, sent out into the world by the dead master Linnaeus. But he also worried that he was not at all suited to the task. He had a low tolerance for pain, he wasn’t particularly strong and he was scared of loud noises. Yet one thing could be counted as an asset for him, and that was his stubbornness. And behind his stubbornness lay vanity. Somewhere he would be able to discover a butterfly, or maybe a fly, that was not listed in the catalogues of entomology, and then he could name it after himself.
He went home. His father was sitting in the arbour soaking wet when he crept through the hedge. His father’s jaws were grinding, he was crumbling away. He was bald, his skin hung loose and he did not recognise his son. It was a living death sitting there in the arbour, his jaws grinding like millstones with no grain, his whole skeleton creaking, his heart heaving like bellows, and Bengler felt that this pilgrimage to his childhood home was like stepping into a nightmare. But he still sat there for a while and chatted with his deranged father. Then he went up to the house, where the housekeeper was pleased to see him, but no more than that. She made up a bed for him in his old room and gave him something to eat. While she was clattering around in the kitchen he walked round the house and picked up any silver he found. He was taking his inheritance in advance, realising that he would be arriving in the African desert as a quite indigent entomologist.
During the night he lay awake. The housekeeper usually brought in his father at sundown and put him to bed on a sofa downstairs. Sometime in the night he went down there and sat in the shadows looking at his father. He was asleep, but his jaws kept on grinding. Something suddenly made Bengler upset, a sorrow that surprised him, and he went over and stroked his father’s bald head In that instant, with that touch, he said his farewell. He felt as if he were standing and watching a coffin being lowered into the earth.
Afterwards he lay awake and waited for daybreak. There was no substance to this waiting, no impatience, no dreams, as though his insides were a flat, cold slab of stone.
He left before the housekeeper awoke.
Three days later he returned to Lund. During his first week back he travelled across the Sound and sold the silver in Copenhagen. Just as he had suspected, he didn’t get much money for what he had to offer. The only thing that brought a good price was a snuffbox which had belonged to the ancestor who had his brains blown out at Austerlitz.
By the following year he had learned everything he now knew about insects. The professor had been friendly, and when he asked why a perpetual student had suddenly been gripped by a fascination for the tiniest creatures, Bengler replied that he actually didn’t know. He had studied colour plates and examined the insects preserved in alcohol, floating weightless in the glass jars that stood on mute shelves in the halls of the Biological Institute. He had learned to distinguish and identify, had plucked off wings and dissected. At the same time he had tried to learn about deserts, about the African continent, which was still largely terra incognita. But in Lund there had been no professors who knew anything about deserts, or barely anything about Africa. He read everything he came across, and went over to Copenhagen a few times to seek out seamen in Nyhavn who had travelled to Cape Town or Dakar and who could tell him about Africa.
He had told no one but Matilda about his plans. She came to him every Thursday between four and six in the afternoon. Besides having sex, always in the missionary position, she also washed his shirts, and afterwards they would drink port and talk. Matilda was nineteen years old and had left her home in Landskrona when her father tried to rape and then set fire to her. For a brief period she had been a maid before she threw away the apron and the subservience and headed for the brothel. She was flat-chested but very nice, and he made no other demands on eroticism but that it should be nice, not troublesome or ecstatic. He told her about the journey on which he would be embarking the next year, early in the spring, when he understood it was not yet too warm in southern Africa. She listened, uninterested beyond the fact that now she would have to look for another steady customer.