“Much is to Elvira’s credit. But my character and my convictions were also important. I still hold those beliefs, but there’s a limit to what one can do.
“At least I don’t talk aloud to myself. Many lonely people do. I wonder what they have to say to themselves. I hope it’s something fun.
“If I was young, I’m sure I’d do it all again. I would certainly have believed in the same cause. There’s nothing extraordinary about socialism, let’s face it. Once you’ve worked out how everything hangs together, it’s actually obvious. Then everything else is wrong and strange. Is there anything more crazily illogical and unreasonable than capitalism? I don’t think so.
“Socialism is nothing special. And neither am I. So we probably go well together. Elvira sometimes said that she thought we did. And then she laughed, of course. As always.
“I wouldn’t want to have been born as anything else. That’s not what matters, after all.
“Whether you like it or not, you’re a part of it. Just spit into the ocean once. And then you have all the eternity you need.”
Oskar.
A strange old boy who lives in an old army sauna.
He usually waves when you go by. He’s only got one hand and one eye.
You should see his index finger. It’s this thick.
He probably sits out there, drinking akvavit. It must be an awful mess. Who tidies up after him? And I suspect he never washes.
I wonder who owns the land he’s living on.
He’s a great old man. He used to be a rock blaster and had a terrible accident. But he’s a cheerful soul anyhow. He’s a nice old boy. And he looks after himself. He’s happy in his sauna, they say.
Oskar on the ground floor.
Oskar’s son owns that big laundry business, you know the one?
He has two girls, too.
His wife is dead.
He turned eighty just recently.
He does his own shopping.
“He walks with a cane.”
“But he’s so handicapped.”
“He always says hello.”
“I hear him when he takes out the trash.”
In the middle of November, he is admitted to the hospital and his right leg is amputated. It is the only way they can stop the gangrene. He lies in his white bed and a few days before Christmas he suffers his first stroke. It paralyzes him and he cannot talk. In the afternoon on Christmas Eve his children come to visit him. They stand around the bed. Oskar looks at them. His mouth has become locked in a stiff smile. They pat his cheek, stroke his hair, touch his two fingers. Then they leave the ward.
“Poor Pappa.”
“Let’s hope he won’t have to lie there too long.”
“It would be best if he could die.”
“Some go on like that for ten years. He has a strong heart, after all.”
“There’s hardly anything left of him.”
“It’s terrible to see.”
“We must be prepared for him to die at any moment.”
“We must call each other.”
“I’ll come back here as soon as I can.”
Out through the hospital entrance. Bare ground, Christmas Eve. Darkness falls.
“Happy Christmas, then. Love to everyone.”
“You too.”
“And we’ll call.”
“Yes. Where do you need to go? I can give you a lift.”
“You don’t have to.”
“My car is right over here.”
The assistant nurse is sitting by the bed, feeding him. It is Christmas Eve.
The second stroke comes one day in April. The bowl of porridge tips over onto his chest and Oskar is dead.
Afterwards
The spring of 1971.
I have an errand in town. I arrive in the morning and am only staying for a few hours.
Before I catch my train back, I have time to go into a pub by the station and drink a beer.
The place is packed. Smoky and the sour smell of beer.
The darts whirl through the smoke and hit the board. Clattering, glasses, jostling.
Oskar is dead.
And now for the future.
Exactly as he said.
Afterword
It is 1972, and Henning Mankell learns that his novel Bergsprängaren has been accepted for publication. His first book. Writing about the international political situation at the time, he explains that “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 book is a modern “Everyman”, the story of an ordinary life filled with the usual triumphs and tragedies, great and small, set against the major Swedish and international political developments of the twentieth century. Oskar Johansson experiences some directly, others at a distance, but he does not believe that he has had anything to do with the changes that have taken place in Sweden during his lifetime. They have happened, and they have had an effect, but he feels he has played no role in their coming about.
In 1997, twenty-five years later, Bergsprängaren is republished, and Mankell adds a preface: “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 been 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.”
And now, in 2020, almost another “short time in history” after Mankell wrote his preface, Bergsprängaren is finally published in English as The Rock Blaster. What would Mankell say about it today?
Of course, the global political landscape has hardly improved. Migration, a significant issue ever since the end of the Second World War, has been brought into particular focus as immigration, and the Swedish ghettos of which he wrote in 1997 have seen frequent unrest. Populism, misinformation, and the weakening of liberal democratic values, which loom ever larger in our lives, would attract his strong criticism. His socialist heart would be no less saddened by the current state of social democracy in Sweden. What he wrote concerning the rise and fall of empires has been borne out, and the disparity between wealth and poverty has continued to grow, exacerbated by the dominance of corporate giants. And what would he make of climate change and the threat to our physical environment?
Oskar’s reality, according to Mankell, is a matter of the struggle between capitalism and socialism, between revolution and reformism. We know on whose side both he and Oskar stand in the first. But that battle is no longer the main one that divides our world - the primary focus now is not on left versus right, but on the growing authoritarianism in many societies; and nobody speaks of “imperialism”, in the sense that Mankell meant it, any more.