The first night he changed his clothes before he sat down to eat the dinner served by Amos, his cook. They had made camp by the bank of a small river. The starry sky was clear and close. Suddenly he saw the Big Dipper. It hung upside down. As a last farewell to everything he had left behind, he surprised his ox-drivers by standing on his head and looking at the Big Dipper as he had seen it as a child.
They thought he was praying to a god.
For a long time he lay awake and waited for a beast of prey to roar in the night.
But everything was very quiet.
Chapter 3
The next day, during the hottest hour of the day when the sun hung straight over his head, the fear came.
At first it was a creeping anxiety. A premonition which he initially dismissed by thinking it was something he had eaten. Or that he had forgotten something, a thought that glided past unnoticed, and he didn’t realise was important. This uneasiness or anxiety was light. The fear came later. It was heavy and pulled at him like a powerful magnet.
They had stopped at the edge of some flat country where low bushes lay blanched in the sun. Neka had set up a parasol and placed his folding chair on a little rug. They had eaten rice, vegetables and a strong spicy bread which according to Wackman was the only kind that did not get mouldy during long expeditions. Amos, Neka and the other two ox-drivers, whose names he hadn’t yet learned, lay sleeping under the wagon. The three oxen stood motionless. Their skin twitched when insects bit them.
It was in that instant the dry earth was transformed into iron. The magnet pulled and he felt the fear coming. He had just taken out his diary to make notes about the morning’s events. He had decided to write three times a day: when he awoke, after the midday rest and before he went to sleep. Since he could not imagine keeping these notes only for his own sake, he had decided that the person he would direct his words to was Matilda. The fear came just as he had finished his account of the morning. They had struck the tent at sunrise. At nine o’clock they passed a dry riverbed where he had identified the skeleton of a crocodile. He calculated the length as three metres and ten centimetres. Just after ten o’clock they passed an area of dense, thorny thickets that made the oxen restless. Before they stopped for their midday rest, he had seen a large bird hovering motionless above his head, as if resting on an invisible pillar. Whether it was an eagle or a vulture he could not tell. After these practical matters he had added, The feeling is very strong. From Hovmantorp I have come all the way here. I realise that the road is endless and life is very short. That was when the fear came. At first he wondered what was causing it. He no longer had diarrhoea, his pulse was normal, he had no infections. There didn’t seem to be any threats: no beasts of prey, no hostile inhabitants. Everything was actually quite idyllic. Motionless oxen, men sleeping under a wagon.
It’s about me, he thought as he wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. It’s about me sitting here in the midst of an unreal idyll. He suddenly thought he saw Professor Enander before him and heard his words: We shall be cutting up a cadaver that was a cadaver even in life.
He thought about how he had fainted and that it had been his way of fleeing. To escape seeing how the belly would be slit open and the guts spill out. Now he sat in the middle of a strange place in the southern part of Africa, on his way to an unknown goaclass="underline" a previously unnamed, uncatalogued, and unidentified fly, or perhaps a butterfly.
He could now look his fear right in the face. What he had decided to devote his life to, an expedition from which it was uncertain that he would return alive, was also a kind of flight. The same as when he fainted in the Anatomy Theatre. Now he was in a different kind of theatre. The African landscape, the motionless oxen, the sleeping men under the wagon, it was all a stage set. He was in the middle of a play about his own flight. From Hovmantorp and the grinding jaws, from his failed studies in Lund, his failed life. Nothing more.
He regarded the revolver that he had bought in Copenhagen, which was now loaded and lying at his feet. It would be very simple to take his own life, he thought. A few simple hand movements, a boom that I would never even hear. Probably the ox-drivers would bury me on the spot, divide up my belongings and vanish to the four winds. They might get into a fight over the oxen, since there are four of them and only three oxen. By then they would already have forgotten that I ever existed. And I would never learn how their names — the two whose names seem to consist only of consonants — are actually pronounced.
He got up and left the shade of the parasol. One of the oxen looked at him. The heat was very strong. He stood underneath a knotty tree, the only one at their resting place. I’m afraid because I don’t know who I am, he thought. Whether all this has been a flight from the thoroughly meaningless life of a student or not, it has certainly been a flight from myself. I have sat drinking for nights on end and denied God’s existence, but it was nothing more than drunken babble. I believe in a god, a god of wrath and judgement, who is everywhere. I was ashamed when I sat and masturbated in the ditches by the fields of Skåne. I knew that someone was watching me when Matilda sucked on me. I have pretended to be liberal, professed myself an adherent of the new world that the engineers and steam power will create. I was full of contempt when Pastor Cavallius in Hovmantorp claimed that railways were an invention of the Devil. I pretended to believe in the future, feigned a resistance to everything obsolete, when actually I am afraid of everything I can’t predict. I am the least-suited person to be standing under this tree in Africa, as the leader of an expedition, on the hunt for an unknown insect. Wackman was absolutely right, of course. He saw straight through me, saw the madman behind the false earnestness.
He went back to the parasol. The fear sat like a knot in his stomach. He folded his hands and said a prayer. I am looking for a truth that does not have to be big. Just so long as it exists. Amen.
Neka, who was fat and shapeless, had woken up. He stood by the tree pissing, then he returned to the wagon and went back to sleep.
Bengler began to think about the English scientist and his theses that they had discussed during late nights at the Småland students’ club. The man had travelled around the world with one of the British Admiralty’s vessels and then returned to England and claimed that human beings were apes. Bengler had seldom said anything during the heated discussions. To a man, the theologians had stood on the side of God, and they had loosed volleys of Scripture against the attacking hordes of freethinkers. And the freethinkers had picked up Darwin’s instruments and slit open the theologians’ arguments with tiny scalpels. He had mostly sat on the sidelines and listened. Now he thought that the fear had probably already been present back then. The fear that God would cease to exist. Whether his grandmother was an ape was not so important.
He could see everything very clearly now. The fear was like a spyglass that he could use to look backwards. And what he saw was nothing. A person from the interior of Småland who didn’t believe in anything, who didn’t really want anything, who in a manifestation of the utmost vanity was looking for a fly that he could name after himself.
At the same time he thought there might be a solution in this. He could use the expedition to try to find a meaning to his own life. He could choose whether there was a god or whether it was the engineers who shaped the world. Was God in a heaven or was He in the iron beams that held together the new factories, the new world? The path that led to the desert and then the desert without paths would give him the time he needed to find an answer.