But the woman who wants to write says bitterly that in the course of a year she has been able to find out only the following about her husband’s sufferings: During the night someone has fled, and at dawn all the prisoners are lined up and made to stand at attention in the pouring rain all day and the next night and all the next day. Those who cannot hold out are lost. At the time when they normally get their food the escapee is brought back, the guards strap a huge drum on him and for the rest of the day he is made to parade up and down before his comrades, drumming a march, endlessly the same march, his own death-march. At midnight he collapses and that is the last they see of him.
It is a dreadful episode but it is not enough for a book and she never learns more. The suffering is suffered and then it should not exist any longer. This suffering was grubby, offensive, mean and small, and therefore one should not speak or write about it. There is too short a distance between writing and the worst kind of suffering; it is only when the suffering has become a cleansed memory that the time may be right. And yet she goes on hoping, each time she is alone with him she hopes to hear those words which will give her the strength to dip her pen in suffering.
Three thousand five hundred metres. The ice-ferns thicken on the windows. The moon has risen, a frosty ring round it. We are told of our whereabouts. We are flying over Bremen but Bremen is not to be seen. Lacerated Bremen is lying hidden beneath dense German clouds, as impenetrably hidden as the mute German agony. We fly out over the sea and on this rolling, marbly floor of clouds and moonlight we take leave of Germany, autumnal and icebound.
About the Authors
Stig Dagerman (1923–1954) was regarded as the most talented writer of the Swedish postwar generation. He published his first novel, The Snake, at age twenty-two, and within four years he wrote four novels, a collection of short stories, a considerable volume of journalism, and four full-length plays. He was at the forefront of Swedish letters in the 1940s, with critics comparing him to William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus. He died at age thirty-one.
Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times best-selling author of many books, including Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History; Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea; and A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry. He lives in New York City and writes frequently about Germany.
Robin Fulton Macpherson is a Scottish poet and translator who has lived in Norway since 1973. He has translated the work of several Swedish poets.