Oskar’s case has been carefully documented by both blasting experts and doctors. There are sketches and X-rays, photographs. There are the succinct notes in his medical records. There is Norström’s extravagant account of what happened that Saturday afternoon shortly after three o’clock. There are Oskar’s own words. A few simple sentences. Short, hesitant.
“I had just got hold of the detonating cable. I was about to start pulling. Then there was a kind of flash.”
Oskar’s case was inexplicable. The blasting experts suggested electric impulses, overheating. The doctors talked about unaccountably light injuries. But the case was diagnosed as “ultimately impossible to explain completely.”
A university professor visited Oskar several times during the autumn. He was a theologian.
“Like everybody else, he asked if I remembered anything. But I didn’t. They wanted to know if everything had suddenly gone black and I said it had gone white. They asked when I had come to again and I told them I didn’t remember. But they never believed me. Why would I hide anything? It was just that I couldn’t remember.”
The medical records are written in a spindly hand that is hard to read. They have been kept.
For whom?
After a heavy shower in August, Oskar notices that water is dripping in through the corner just above the spirit stove. I take a quick look and see that the roofing felt is rotting there.
“We’ll have to re-line the whole roof. Might as well do it, if I’m going to go on living.”
The mail boat brings out the felt. As I lie on the roof hammering in nails, I hear Radio Nord coming from the room below. Sometimes there is the sound of shuffling across the floor. Ten minutes later, the coffee is ready.
Boiled coffee, on the weak side.
The last summer Oskar visited the island he returned to his apartment on October 24. A strong north wind was blowing, making it difficult for the boat that came to fetch him to come in by the planks that made up Johansson’s jetty.
In the middle of November, one of his legs began to feel bad. In the mornings it was almost dead, without any sensation. He went to the hospital and was admitted for the second time in his life. This would be the last time. He got gangrene in his leg. It was amputated and one morning just before Christmas he had a brain haemorrhage. His other leg became paralysed, and one of his arms, and he could no longer speak. He remained like that until the beginning of April. Then he had another stroke and died an hour past midnight on April 9.
It was a Tuesday. The funeral was on the Saturday. At 12.45 bells began to toll, and the congregation consisted of his children. The coffin was brown. Real candles and a simple floral arrangement, which the undertakers had organised. Two short organ pieces, the priest reading from the service handbook and the ceremony is over. Outside, the air is sharp. Work is being done on the flower beds in the churchyard. The siblings go off together to have coffee, agree on a day to settle the estate.
On the Monday the death is announced in the only remaining local newspaper.
The funeral has taken place.
The urn with the ashes is interred a month later. Oskar’s son drives to the churchyard during his lunch break.
It does not take long to settle the estate. No-one wants the furniture. Linen, household equipment, books, pictures and the television are divided without difficulty. The small amount of money will pay for the funeral. The clothes are burned.
Nobody ever came to take away any of the things that Oskar had left in the cabin. The radio is still there, an old tin pillbox with a few 10-öre coins in it, some sheets and pillowcases. Mirror, saucepan and cracked blue cups.
The smell is still there. The bitter smell of old age.
The Key Words
This story.
Tiny beads of narrative that string together to form a rosary.
The notes and the memories. The two Oskar Johanssons. One a genuine former rock blaster who spent his summers living in an old sauna. The other an Oskar Johansson who becomes a part of a story. But both of them died one day, of a brain haemorrhage.
This account is an attempt to piece together what Oskar never actually said. To try to describe what caused the changes in him.
There are a few key words.
“I played the same games as all the others.”
“I obviously went on working as a blaster, as soon as I’d recovered.”
“I’ve been a worker all my life.”
“Lots of things have changed, but not for us.”
Elly
A lamp on the bedside table casts a faint, pale light through its shade. Oskar is lying on his back in bed and his breathing is regular. His head is wrapped in white bandages. A thick wad of dressing is held in place over his left eye by a strip of gauze tied around his jaw and the top of his head. The blue-white blanket has been drawn up to his chin. What one can see of Oskar’s face, his mouth, the right eye - which is closed - one cheek, his nose, is pallid yellow. His arms are resting on top of the blanket. The right one ends in a bundle of gauze and compresses. There is a similar round white shape over his left hand. The bed-cover is raised over the pelvis and lower abdomen because of all the bulky bandages dressing the wounds ripped open by the dynamite.
Oskar’s bed is grey-blue. The paint has peeled in some places and the steel shows through. His medical notes are hanging at the foot of the bed. The temperature chart sketches the contours of an Alpine landscape which gradually evens out into unbroken terrain. The curtains are closed. Everything in the room is stiff and pale.
A white-haired night nurse opens the door. She tiptoes up to the bed, leans over Oskar, listens, puts one hand on his heart. Then she turns, pads out and shuts the door.
Oskar is not sleeping. He lies there, listening to his pain. Under the bandage over his eye, there is a twitch in the empty socket. He tries to picture the hole, but the image jumps about, jerky, unsteady. One moment all he sees is a red hole, then it changes to a slimy lump of pus floating about in a bowl of skin. The eye is gone, but the spasms remain, echoes of the blinking that is no longer there. The constant reminder makes him feel faintly, persistently sick. Oskar tries to focus his thoughts and mental images on other things, but every third second his eye blinks and the empty left socket responds.
A constant pain pierces his abdomen. It throbs and sears through all his shredded nerves. Oskar does not know exactly what has happened, other than that half his penis has been torn off, but that the urethra and the scrotum with the testicles are intact. He does not know, has not seen. It is all wrapped up in a thick bundle, but he can feel the mess and the stickiness underneath. Each time the bandages are changed, he tries to steel himself to look, but he either cannot or does not want to. Every movement, every twisting of his body, causes unbearable pain and he cries out. At first, he tried with all his might not to. He bit holes in his tongue, tensed every undamaged muscle in his body to strain against the scream bubbling up in his chest, but he could never stop it from bursting out. Now he does not even try to resist.
Oskar dozes off at regular intervals. There is no difference between night and day. Five times in every twenty-four hours he is given liquid sustenance, a warm hand supports the back of his neck and each sip sets fire to his torment. When he urinates, the bandages are changed. Then he sleeps, wakes up when he moves, lies and looks or shuts his eye and day is the same as night. The hours flow together and thoughts and images flit through his mind.