I had no notion of this until the summer of the year I turned thirteen, when, late one evening, my dad, my brother, and I set out to go crab fishing. This was an unusual event in itself, normally my father never did anything with us, preferring to stay in his office in the basement, silent and somber and tormented. When he did come up, he often flew into rages, so that our relationship with him was one of fear and apprehension rather than love. But occasionally he would become mild and amiable, as on this evening when he came in to us and asked if we wanted to go for a trip in the boat. We did. The streets were empty as we walked down to the floating jetties in the late summer darkness, no gaze fell on us, and I saw how this put him at his ease; he leaped gaily aboard, took the equipment we handed to him, rolled up the covering, loosened the moorings, started the engine, backed slowly out of the slip, put it in gear, and set out across the sound, standing in front of the front thwart. That was how he liked it. All the families on the estate had boats, it was the main occupation out there, trips to the inshore islands on weekends and during holidays, fishing in the evening after work, unless you just stayed put and puttered about onboard with something that wasn’t quite as it should be while the boat was moored or laid up for the winter. Many of the children had their own boats, and large parts of our formative years were spent down at the docks, where everything that happened was noted and talked about. For a long time ours was the only family without a boat, as my dad spent all his spare time on his garden, which was certainly unique in its mixture of rampant fertility and military precision, but which had, more than anything else, an air of hopelessness about it because none of the neighbors shared his interest and so made it seem like the limit of refinement lying there like some island in a sea of wrecked cars, caravans, garages, concrete mixers, slipped rock banks, and heaps of earth. We weren’t allowed to walk on the grass in our garden, no one was, and the other youngsters were as scared of him as we were, although they laughed at him in secret too. Could it have been that he wanted to make amends for this state of affairs when all at once he made up his mind to buy a boat? He’d phoned up from town and told us to go down to the jetties. My brother and I went there with our mother, and after half an hour he came planing into the sound in the new boat. His face lit up like a child’s when he caught sight of us. But we weren’t the only ones there. Other kids had gathered to see what was going on, every new boat arriving was an event, and this one especially, being ours. Initially they were just inquisitive, I think, they expressed themselves like connoisseurs once the boat was close enough for them to see what type it was and what sort of engine it had, but their curiosity turned to malicious pleasure when Dad was about to come alongside. I suppose he must have been fearing this moment all the way home, and had therefore planned each step in advance, because there was no hesitation in his actions when the speed slackened and the boat began to glide toward the landing dock. An arc, he must have thought, reduce speed and steer in a simple arc in among the pontoons. But he hadn’t made enough allowance for water resistance, and he sailed slowly past the slips as we stood watching, the tense body that didn’t know what to do, other than needing to hide its uncertainty behind movements that were always equally assured. The boat slid past, he wanted to reverse, but instead put on speed, and with a roar crashed into the stern of the cabin cruiser alongside. The kids around us laughed. I was mortified by the whole thing and had to distance myself from my dad, and laughed with them.
Did he see me?
Yes, he did. Just as he finally got the motor into reverse, he glanced up at us, and saw that I was laughing too. His gaze filled me with fear, I knew he’d have a go at me later on. Strangely enough, I was wrong. He never said a word about the incident.
He backed out about fifty yards before trying again, this time more carefully, but even so the same thing happened again, the boat drifted away, and he stood as if paralyzed behind the wheel as the boat floated past us a second time. Out again. When the same thing happened the third time, he gave up, motioned my mother onto the pontoon and threw the rope to her, and she hauled the boat in so that he could get ashore and push the boat into the right place. He was a respected man in most matters, and perhaps that was why the laughter among the onlookers was so free that evening. But he’d made up his mind, and didn’t give in, even though he must have known that a number of humiliations lay ahead. Another problem arose during the summer and autumn, it got harder and harder to make the boat plane, and one day he went over to some of the older boys and began talking to them, in a kind of quasi-technical, jocular sort of way, the thought of which makes me blush even now, years later, peppered as it was with references to boats, cars, and engines. With seeming casualness, he maneuvered the conversation around to his own boat, why it was getting less and less responsive, what did they think could be the matter? They followed him over to his boat, squatted down, and scrutinized the hull for a few seconds.
“Well?” my father asked.
“Haven’t you ever heard of growth, Mr. Vankel?”
They would never have used that tone with him if he hadn’t entered their special area of expertise.
“Growth?” said Dad. “But the boat’s plastic!”
This rejoinder quickly spread through the estate and long remained a byword whenever anyone wanted to express incomprehension about something. But the boat’s plastic!
Over the next few days I was dispatched to the boat with a scraper, snorkel, and face mask to clean off all the algae that had attached itself to the hull. There I lay for hours, the butt of general derision, splashing around in the cold water and scraping away until my skin was numb and my limbs stiff with cold. He couldn’t even manage to do that right; the boat should have been lifted out and put into drydock over at the yard, of course, where he could have scraped the bottom and put on the chemicals in a matter of hours, a fact that the onlookers never failed to point out.
Even though now, a year later, he’d learned from his mistakes and mastered the necessary seamanship to some extent, he didn’t like it. Boating had joined the long list of things to be avoided without us noticing the fact, after all we’d grown up with the idea that he never went to the hairdresser but always cut his own hair, that he never took the bus, that he never shopped at the local shop but always at shopping centers miles away, that we never had visitors at home, that he never touched us or our mother, that he never played soccer or went skiing or skating, like the other dads, but always sat in his office listening to music, classical music — with tears in his eyes, as I discovered one afternoon when I went to fetch my bicycle pump from the back of the house and happened to look in the cellar window as I went past. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known he was there. But now I cupped my hands and bent down. His head was only eighteen inches away from me. He was swaying backward and forward to the music, his eyes were closed, tears streamed down his cheeks. Shocked, I jerked my head back. All the rest of that day I couldn’t think of anything else, and each time that image of him welled up, my heart beat harder within me. But it didn’t make me feel sorry for him, on the contrary: I only felt even more scared. It made his fits of temper seem even more sinister.
The boat passed under the bridge, and for a few seconds the sound of the engine became hollow and cavernous. I glanced up at the carriageway, rocking slightly in the darkness above us. When we passed this spot during the day, it was possible to see the stone piers of the old bridge on the bottom nearer to the shore, and there were rumors that vehicles with corpses inside them were there as well, casualties of the time the bridge was blown up toward the end of the war. We had never seen anything, even though we went diving there every summer, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t right. There were plenty of places in the vicinity with skeletons from those times. The best-known was Roligheten, a clearing in the forest a few miles farther inland, where several hundred men had been executed; group after group had been ordered to kneel before a trench, blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, shot in the neck, and kicked in, and for several days after the trench had been filled in, you could see how the ground undulated like the sea as the gas made the bodies swell. The hottest summer on record, it bubbled and simmered under there continuously, sometimes small fountains of blood spurted up from the ground. The stench must have been unendurable. After the war they decided that the grave should remain as it was, and apart from a monument on the edge of the forest, a kind of obelisk with a commemorative plaque to the fallen, there isn’t anything now to mark that clearing out from any other. Perhaps the grass is still a little greener and lusher, that’s all. I first went there on a class visit and subsequently read every description of the event I came across, because there was something fascinating about it, mainly because of the sensational awfulness of what had happened, of course, but also because it displayed a truth of a different kind to anything I’d come across up until then. It robbed the participants of everything apart from their bodies, executioners and executed alike, those who left that place alive and those who were left there to rot. No spirit, no humanity, no feelings, no concepts of good or evil, only eyes and mouths, hair and teeth, rib cages and arms, kneecaps and soles, grass and trees, earth and water, air and sunlight, and blue, blue sky.