Henning Mankell
The Rock Blaster
Author’s Preface
It has been twenty-five years since this book first saw the light of day. A quarter of a century, that is. I wrote the first part in an apartment on Løkkeveien in Oslo. It was late autumn and cold. I could see the American embassy through the window of the draughty study. There were demonstrations going on outside the building all the time. I used to walk over there between my writing stints. You could still catch the occasional sharp remark from people passing in the street. But they were fewer and less hostile than before. It was already 1972. The Americans were losing their desperate war of aggression in Vietnam.
I remember that autumn clearly. The leaves turning yellow in the Palace Park, the marines outside the embassy gate always grim. But most of all I remember what I was thinking. It was a time of great joy, of great energy. Everything was still possible. Nothing was either lost or settled. Except that the Vietnamese were certain to win. Imperialism was beginning to show signs of strain. The course had already been set, along sufficiently deep and navigable channels. But there were, of course, also indications to the contrary: neither I nor any of my friends seriously believed that we would see South Africa’s apartheid system brought to an end in our lifetime. In retrospect, I can now recognize that we were both right and wrong, as is always the case when one tries to look into the future.
While I sat and wrote this book, I was thinking: with this one, for the first time, I would get into print. Until then I had managed to have bits and pieces published in the newspapers. And some of my plays had been performed. I had been directing in various theatres. That way I could afford to spend a month at a time only writing. Which was what it was all about. The purpose of my life. I could not imagine anything else. What could it otherwise be?
I had made up my mind to try and avoid ever having any of my work rejected. At least any longer texts. Novels, in other words. For that reason, the year before I had torn up a couple of manuscripts which I did not think were good enough. I never submitted them to a publisher. But when this book was eventually finished (the latter part was written in an equally draughty apartment on Trotzgatan in Falun, a small provincial town in the middle of Sweden), I dropped the manuscript into a postbox. In June I received a postcard with a picture of Dan Andersson. Sune Stigsjöö was the head of Författarförlaget at the time. He told me that the book had been accepted and would be published.
It was well received. (As I recall, Björn Fremer’s in Kvällsposten was the only negative review.) As a result, I began to get subsidies. I could now dispense with some of my bread-and-butter activities.
That is now a quarter of a century ago. I wrote the manuscript on an unreliable old typewriter with Norwegian characters. Today I am composing these lines on a computer that weighs scarcely more than three kilos.
Certainly, much has happened in those twenty-five years. Some walls have come down, others have gone up. One empire has fallen, the other is being weakened from within, new centres of power are taking shape. But the poor and exploited have become even poorer during these years. And Sweden has gone from making an honest attempt at building a decent society to social depredation. An ever-clearer division between those who are needed and those who are expendable. Today there are ghettos outside Swedish cities. Twenty-five years ago they did not exist.
As I read through this book again after all these years, I realise that this quarter century has been but a short time in history. What I wrote here is still highly relevant.
I have made a number of small changes to the wording for this edition. But the story is the same. I have not touched it.
It was not necessary to do so.
Henning Mankell
Mozambique, November 1997
The News Item
“Why the hell isn’t it going off?”
Norström angrily kicked his left foot. He had got it tangled in a ball of steel wire which someone had carelessly left lying among the rock debris. As he thrashed about, the wire tightened ever higher up his leg. He could easily have bent down and yanked the snarl free with a single tug.
But Norström did not bend down. He kept on furiously kicking. He was sweating. His grey flannel shirt, unbuttoned far down over his bulging stomach, soaked up the sweat and gave off an acrid smell of dirty skin.
Norström was the foreman of a team of detonators. It was a Saturday afternoon in the middle of June and steam was rising from the heat beating down on the unshaded work site. Norström was in charge of blasting tunnels for a railway line. The line was to be made double-track and that required three new tunnels. Right now, they were working on the middle one, also the longest and most awkward. They had just started on the opening in the rock wall. The rough and spiky surface of the grey granite had been laid bare of its thin covering of soil. Sunlight reflected off the cliff face, which rose almost vertically for about thirty metres. There was a hillock, roughly a hundred metres in circumference, and the tunnels and railway line were to go straight through it.
Norström did not like blasting tunnels. “You either get rid of the whole thing or just leave it. Making holes straight through is asking for trouble. Sooner or later it’ll collapse.” That was his view. In all his fifty years he had been lucky enough not to have to blast tunnels more than once every five years, but now he had three to do in one go.
“Will someone come and get rid of this bloody mess!”
Norström glared angrily at some workers who were resting on their pinch bars. They were gratefully enjoying the unexpected break. First the charge had failed, and then Norström had got his foot tangled up in some steel wire. They leaned on their spikes and waited with their backs turned to the sun.
“You run over and help him.”
Oskar Johansson gave the youngest in their team a light kick with the tip of his boot. A lad of fourteen, small and skinny. He leaped up at once and ran across the sandy ground to Norström, quickly bent down and began to tug at the wire.
“Don’t pull so bloody hard. Just loosen it.”
Norström was becoming more and more annoyed. He squinted at the sun, then turned towards the rock face, glanced down at the boy carefully digging around in the tangle of steel wire, and then glared at the blasters, immobile and leaning on their spikes.
“Why isn’t it going off?” he bellowed.
Oskar Johansson straightened up.
“I’ll take a look.”
At the same time, Norström’s foot came free of the wire. The break was over. Now the failed charge had to be checked. And that was Johansson’s job, since he had primed it. Every explosion was a personal thing. The dynamite was the same, unpredictable and treacherous, but every charge had its owner, the one responsible for it.
The accelerating pace of industrial expansion made improved communications necessary. The railways had to be extended. There were to be more tracks. There were more and longer trains and the roar of explosions echoed throughout the country.
They were well into summer. The constant heat since the end of May had begun to scorch the ground. When the blasters sought the shade of the birch trees for their short breaks, there was a crackling under their boots.
Johansson wiped his forehead. He looked at the back of his hand. It was shiny with sweat and he wiped it on his shirt. He was twenty-three years old, the youngest in the team of blasters — because the helper did not count. Oskar had already worked on blasting teams for seven years, and enjoyed it. He was tall, well built, with a round face and an open expression which was never serious. His eyes were bright blue, and his fair hair curled over his forehead. The early summer heat had turned his skin brown. He was wearing a grey-white shirt and dark blue cotton trousers, and was barefoot.