He’s going to kill me, Daniel thought. He’s going to bite me in the throat and shake me until I’m dead.
The man was breathing in heavy, panting gasps. He looked at his hand as if he didn’t comprehend what had happened, then turned and staggered out of the door. Daniel closed it and wiped the blood from his mouth. There was no sound below him now. He didn’t understand what had happened. Why did the man open the door without having permission to come in?
He stood still in the middle of the room.
From the street he heard a horse whinny. Then a dog barked and a girl shrieked.
He heard footsteps on the stairs. He recognised them at once. It was Father coming back. He was walking slowly, putting down his feet carefully, not stamping. There was a knock on the door.
‘Come in.’
Father stood in the doorway smiling.
‘You’ve learned,’ he said.
Before Daniel could reply there was a racket on the stairs. The man Daniel had bitten stood in the doorway with a bloody rag wrapped round his hand.
‘Are you the one who dragged this troll from hell here? He tried to bite off my hand!’
Father looked confused. He had a greasy brown-paper packet with him that smelled like food.
‘I don’t believe I understand,’ he replied.
The man pointed at Daniel in a rage.
‘That black monkey tried to bite off my hand. Look!’
He unwound the bloody rag and showed him the wound, which dripped blood onto the floor.
Father stared at his hand and then at Daniel.
‘Did you do this?’
Daniel nodded. His tongue had swollen in his mouth. He couldn’t squeeze out any words.
‘I’m a coal carrier,’ said the man. ‘I work twelve hours a day. The sacks can weigh up to two hundred kilos. I carry them and I drag them. And I have to sleep. Then this thundering starts up here.’ He grabbed the rope from Daniel’s hand. ‘He’s skipping. As if he was hopping on my forehead. I have to have quiet if I’m going to get any sleep.’
Father still didn’t seem to grasp what had happened.
‘He’s not used to things,’ he said. ‘He’s not used to floors and walls and ceilings. It won’t happen again.’
The man wrapped the rag round his hand. Slowly he seemed to be calming down.
‘He looks like a human being. But he has teeth like a wild animal. I’ve been with women who have bitten me, but nothing like this.’
‘He’s a human being from another part of the world. He’s on a temporary visit.’
The man looked at Daniel. ‘Does he eat human flesh?’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘It felt like he was trying to tear off a piece of my hand.’
‘He eats exactly the same food as you or I.’
The man shook his head. ‘Life gets odder and odder. All this work. And then one night you meet a black boy who’s skipping on your head. Will it ever end?’
‘Will what end?’
The man shrugged his shoulders and cast about with his bandaged hand in the air, as if searching for a word that was actually an insect.
‘Life. Which doesn’t make much sense as it is.’
Then another thought occurred to him.
‘He isn’t sick, is he?’
‘Why should he be sick?’
‘What do you know about the diseases he might be carrying? Last year smallpox raged through the city, and this spring the children were shitting themselves to death.’
‘He’s not infectious. You won’t turn black if you touch him.’
The man shook his head and disappeared down the stairs. Father closed the door.
‘I can understand that you were scared but you mustn’t bite people.’
‘He came in and I didn’t say “Come in”.’
Father nodded slowly.
‘You still have a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘But I’ll protect you as best I can.’
In the packet he had fish that tasted strongly of salt. Daniel almost threw up after the first bite.
‘You have to eat,’ Father said. ‘I don’t have any other food.’
Daniel took another bite. But when Father turned away to sneeze, he spat the food into his hand and kept it clenched under the table.
After the meal Father lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Daniel tried to enter his head and see his thoughts. He knew it was possible, Be had told him about it. A person you knew well did not have to say much, you could work out what she was thinking.
But Father was far away. Daniel imagined he could see him lying stretched out on a mattress in Andersson’s house, in the room that had smelled so rank from the ivory.
The light from the candle flickered over his face. Daniel wondered about the pinched and often so sombre faces he encountered in this country. The girls who had skipped in the courtyard had laughed, even the one who was very fat, but the grown-ups here were not like Be or Kiko. Life must be hard if they couldn’t even manage a smile. Or their thoughts made it impossible for them to laugh.
But he knew that this wasn’t true. From the street he kept hearing people laughing. He thought about Kiko, who sometimes grew tired of all his questions. Now he felt that he was growing tired of himself. He could have been lying there in the sand, with his limbs hacked off and the blood flowing, but he was alive, and one day he would finish painting the antelope that Kiko had started. The gods were waiting there inside the rock, and he couldn’t forsake them. That would be like forsaking Be and Kiko and the others who had been killed, or all those who had died before them.
The candle had almost burned down. Father was asleep. Daniel blew out the flame, waited until its glowing wick was swallowed up by the darkness, and then undressed and crept into bed. Far below him he could hear a man snoring. He didn’t regret biting the man on the hand. It had been necessary to defend his rope. But maybe he had bitten too hard.
The next day Father led him through the narrow, stinking alleys to a square where a man was sitting on a horse.
‘That’s a statue,’ Father said. ‘A man who will never move. He will always sit there and point. Until someone tips the statue over one day.’
They cut across the square and went through a big, tall gateway. The staircase was very wide. When they got halfway up the stairs Father stopped and put his hands on Daniel’s shoulders.
‘The most important thing now is to get some money,’ he said. ‘A man lives here who wants to measure and draw you. For that he will pay us money. I wrote to him from Hovmantorp. He’s waiting for us.’
Daniel didn’t know what the word measure meant, Or the word draw either, but he knew that what he was supposed to do now was something good. Father looked at him with a smile. His eyes were wide open now, not absent-looking as they were so often when he spoke to him.
They entered an apartment that was very large. A woman in a white apron asked them to wait. She gave a start when she first saw Daniel, even though he remembered to bow.
After a while a man in a long red dressing gown with a pipe in his mouth came in through a curtained entrance. He moved soundlessly. Daniel discovered to his surprise that the man was barefoot. He had no hair on his head but his face was covered by a beard. He smiled.
‘Hans Bengler,’ he said. ‘Six years ago we sat on a bench outside the cathedral in Lund.’
‘I remember.’
‘I told you the truth. Do you remember?’
‘I do.’
‘That nothing would ever become of you.’
Father laughed.
‘You had no dreams. You didn’t want to do anything. But something must have happened.’