The Parable Book

by Per Olov Enquist, Deborah Bragan-Turner

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"The love that dare not speak its name . . ." Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15, cutting across a garden, chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of. Can it never be spoken of? Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, has decided to "come out" - but in ways entirely novel and unexpected. He has written the book that smoldered unwritten within him his entire life. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write. This poignant memoir of love as a religious experience - as a modern form of the Resurrection - is also a deeply felt reflection on the transitoriness of friendship, the fraught nature of family relationships, and the importance of giving voice to what cannot be forgotten. A parable as hauntingly intense as any Bergman film. Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner

Release date: June 2, 2016

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 240

Sample

According to the Workbook, he has met her only three times.

The first time is a Sunday afternoon in July 1949, when he employs the cryptic phrase “the woman on the knot-free pine floor”. The second time is 22 August, 1958, in Södertälje. The third is in November 1977.

He had apparently promised never to tell anyone, ever.

But so many years have passed now. So it does not matter. Much later, he regrets not making a better speech in the parish hall after his mother’s funeral in 1992.

It should have been a simpler speech, not as humorous. He had dodged things, he ought to have been more direct, not skirted round what he should have put in a nutshell. A few years after, he had wanted to write a revised version of the address, printed in only ten corrected copies perhaps, to share among the grandchildren: a very mild text, no biblical fear and trembling.

Yet it was not an easy thing to discuss or write down for children. He often wondered what had caused the present problem. After all, he was an experienced writer. He had learnt how to write as a child and had carried on.

He was never afraid when writing, but this time he was.

As a result, he was disorientated. It was as if the pile of his books lay at his feet and he kicked out at them, as though he were not guilty! It was as if he were dividing himself up. One part of him was the part written down, to which he gave a name. Another was his brother, who had died while still an embryo, two minutes after being torn from his mother’s covetous womb. That part held the answer. When the rigid little corpse was photographed, its mouth was not open, like a fish’s on dry land, but it had a sweet face. And this might have been infectious – to the brother who came two years later! In other words himself! The sweet appearance was infectious! And had come to light deep in old age. A sweetness that prevented him writing a love story.

It was beyond belief.

There were good reasons to be afraid if this was the way one thought – and many did.

When revising the funeral oration one could also look out for the black holes in it. Or, for what lay between the spoken words: there might still be time. Force one’s way in through a chink in history. As if that were simpler! It was what was left out that hurt most. The holes and the chinks were not obvious; they were mostly like notes where the lines had been written on top of other lines, so that the original words were gradually overlaid, growing grey, and then black, and in the end wholly indecipherable. Words overlaid by their own, covering themselves up.

That was how it was with simplicity. It was self-salvation.

*

He travelled up to the village in September.

He wanted, for safety’s sake, to visit Granholmen, with its fir trees many thousands of years old, “At least a thousand years old!”, his mother had assured him in the ’40s, as she sat on a rock, staring out over the water years after her husband’s death, the only one left in whom to put her trust being her little boy. Though he was thin and rather tall, actually.

The fir trees were enormous, the island only seventy metres across, the building his father had first put up as a summer house ten metres from the Green House. And then he died, slap-bang-wallop!, and his grandfather and uncles had taken the whole thing down and in winter it was horse-drawn over the ice to Granholmen and rebuilt.

That was in the days when people could build houses.

The family had stepped in because they were shaken by Father’s death in an almost mystifying way. A great deal of hope had been vested in Elof. To a certain degree he had been special, though not in the least odd, and because the family had wanted to make some sort of gift to her. She was an in-law, and thus, strictly speaking, outside the family, but, more specifically, the little boy belonged. The grandfather, P.W., had constructed a rowing boat for her as well. It was unwieldy yet stable, so the boy, when in it, would face no danger.

He took not a penny. Maybe he wanted to show that they were sticking together.

Fifty years later – after he had begun to be published, and had, in those publications, to some extent, depicted scenes of Mother sitting there on the island – the village had changed Granholmen’s name to Majaholmen. It was a reminder that this was the place where she had spent her summers, alone with the little boy. There was no other summer dwelling on the island, so the name was right enough.

His grandfather’s rowing boat was still there in 2007 – amazingly. But it had been coated in plastic and was now white. Through the layer of plastic could be seen the bolts, which might have been called clinkers; but no, that was definitely not the right term. Grandfather P.W. was the village blacksmith, but he built rowing boats as well and would probably have known if they were called clinkers. The stern had now been squared off to accommodate an outboard motor. It was quite unusual, but fundamentally it was, without doubt, P.W.’s boat. Plastic on the outside, the body built in 1935.

It was like a biblical metaphor, if that was the way one wanted to see it, which many did.

Gunnar Hedman took him across. They landed on the north side and he could see immediately that the island was in bad shape. From the branches of the colossal fir trees where he had played as a child – that is to say, long before he had grown old and been surrounded by dying friends who, muttering their distrust, suspected him of going to the village to dig up the truth about the first woman, and then forever bury her! Those same friends who now huddled around him like a grove of pines! – from those branches he had watched for enemy warships.

Now, in the autumn of 2007, all the fir trees were gone, each one felled.

Three tool-sheds had appeared, along with two new summer cottages in an apparent state of collapse. A chicken run with a rusty fence indicated human existence. Five hens were running jerkily around. Their own summer cottage seemed much the same as seventy years earlier, except now largely dilapidated and used as a dump for rubbish or junk; he tried to look in through the window, but it just hurt.

The island had been violated. But the stones by the water’s edge, where Mother used to sit, looked as they did before.

He pulled himself together and walked round the island, as he had done through his childhood, and he knew that this could not be edited or corrected; this was how it was, and it had changed, everything had been tainted.

Why had he returned? This was not like stepping into the River of the Arrow, as he had read, when he was a child, in Kipling’s Kim. He had to find enlightenment for himself, and elsewhere – if it was not already too late. Though the large rock, five metres out from the edge on the north side, remained completely intact.

She had been so beautiful, sitting there on the rock.

*

He flees, sniffing the air irritatedly, like a dog frightened when accosted by its own smell.

Is it necessary to write this down? He is not afraid of death. But the road there terrifies him more and more.

Bereft was a word he tried out; it would furnish a way into the project, for now there was some urgency. Urgency was another word; he did not know how many years remained. He could see the answer in the dying eyes of his friends; it was as if, before death, eyes would water, and those who were soon to die, perhaps long, long after him, now looked beseechingly, their eyes pleading with him. It reminded him of the boy Siklund who visited him in 1974 – before this same Siklund went mad and died. He remembered Siklund’s eyes, revealing and insane; but then Siklund had been saved and the cat resurrected; and by moulding his death into a biblical metaphor for several days, Siklund had almost delivered him once more into the faith he had studied away.

The cat!

He stopped himself abruptly. Was there not some minor misdeed with which he could slow time down? From his childhood! He could write short, meditative letters to himself, or maybe they should be reflective. The pieces of paper Father had left appeared to speak of death, love and possibly eternal life. “Isn’t this eternal life just as mysterious as the here and now?” It has to be a quotation, copied down. It was hard to believe he would have expressed himself in that way. He had no memories himself. The speech in the parish hall must contain memories. It could begin with something he had concealed, something harmless. Like that silly, petty crime, which must have taken place in the war summer of 1940, in July, when he put the cat on a raft he had cobbled together and let it sail off towards a certain, frightful death.

Or his friend Håkan’s death and resurrection on Lake Bursjön!

“Get a grip on yourself!” he constantly whispers. “Don’t be ridiculous! One thing at a time!” There were, he thought, some trivial offences it would be good to have up his sleeve in case he became nervous. There was the cat, for example: that could be retained. Then there was his response to death, which had not been preserved and which was urgent now, as his friends stood waving and lamenting on the riverbank. Reminding him that, if he did not die, he had to write down this love story.

A show of strength! He recalled a meeting at a library in Södertälje. A woman had stood up during the discussion afterwards and referred to an erotic passage in the historical novel he was reading from – which veiled his own experiences so well, he had not given himself away; historical novels were obviously the best recourse when he felt nervous and wanted to cover things up. The woman had read it, she acknowledged quite modestly, and said she had suddenly experienced a warm feeling in her body, in her nether regions, such as she had never felt before in all her reading life. And she wanted to thank him! She may even have used the expression “warm feeling in my private parts”. A murmur went through the audience, because, after her contribution, the woman had almost groaned with the effort of sitting down. What she had said was really wonderful, but – most importantly – everyone could see she was incredibly old! Maybe ninety! Or more! And confessing that she still experienced desire!

She had dared! – without warning his eyes had filled with tears, just because she was so very old – she had dared to stand up in public and spoken of desire. In some sense he had known her, and yet he had not.

That was not all. Later she had come to the front, stumbling, her walking laboured, and said, “Maybe we have met before?” “Wasn’t it at Larssonsgården? . . .” “No,” she had said abruptly. And, as if scared out of her wits, she had turned and shuffled out.

But incorporate this into the speech at the parish hall? Impossible!

Was that how to piece it together? Small absurdities and then all at once a hammer blow! The door is opened! The way clear!

Someone had shouted: “That was life!”

*

He had worked (sic! – his own term! – hypocrisy!) until late on the night of 27 February, 2011, and slept fitfully; he had woken at about four and decided he would definitely complete the project, but he would never let it go any further.

What a relief! Only for the grandchildren!

Utterly calm among the trees, his friends, the dying flock. They watched over him. Seven trees clustered outside the window, resembling a herd of cows; they looked the same, like the previous day, the previous year. He had tried to depict them and thereby resume his life of imagery, but the trees remained the same from day to day. In the end he began to realise that it would be thus until the seven trees were dead. At four o’clock or thereabouts, he noted in his Workbook, the seven fir trees are still alive! The dog had lifted up its head and looked at him in sorrow or impatience. Then its head sank, seemingly into a deep sleep.

What sorts of dreams do dogs dream? And would they truly be raised up to heaven at Jesus’ second coming?

He had always wondered if eternal life was for dogs as well, and whether he could take this dog with him over the dividing line. He imagined death as an existence with the dog close by his side after they had reached the far bank of the river.

It could be the final project.

He thought about death a great deal but comforted himself that it must have something to do with all his friends being caught up in the process of dying. Or as having already finished their lives but thoughtlessly letting their bodies linger by the riverbank, as if they were still not quite done, put together, added up.

The project that he was now obliged to complete was a revised version of the speech to Mother after her death, which, in this corrected and updated version (I’ll be there soon! Wait for me! I’m bringing the dog!), described the form of hesitancy in his step, but without the cheerful directness and decisiveness of the earlier speech. Had he not a right to indistinctness? This might become Sibelius’ Eighth Symphony! The one that the Finn . . . the drunk . . . whom he so admired . . . had never managed!

But not Sibelius’ Eighth this time, only his own, invisible and inaudible to others.

The trouble with his friends’ inhibited death seemed to be that, initially, some of them resolutely subjugated themselves to death, but later vacillated, paused in mid-step, as, for example, after a serious brain haemorrhage: as if this determined and courageous death had in their particular case been hasty.

His friends were, in several cases, difficult to interpret. There was something obscurely bright or glassy in their eyes when he, on his Tuesday and Friday visits to see them, tried to construe their slurred requests. Their eyes glistened and beseeched him: Understand! In recent months they had become seven in number, a flock now; soon another three were certain to join them, a kind of copse waiting to be felled. He had been smiling and optimistic in order to disguise his powerlessness, and fearful when he temporarily took leave of them.

But the way they looked at him! As if wanting to ask something. About death, presumably. Or life, so soon to be expended. As though he were an expert, or at the very least a counsellor. What a nerve!

They had listened to his advice before, of course. Why not this time? But he could not advise them to take the last step. Take it! He could not say, “Take it! Or else I’ll do it myself!”

It would be callous, maybe not even prudent.

*

The previous evening he had worked on his treatise about the Danish king Christian IV’s love saga with Kirsten.

It had stayed with him. The strange story of Christian IV’s love for a woman who said she hated him, and therefore! – it was this therefore he was too innocent to comprehend! – aided by the branding iron, just like Lisbeth, drove him to ruin.

Yet, with measured gestures and gentle smiles, with knowledge that was of no use at all, he had to do something.

He knew that the text, which he called “the score” (like the Eighth Symphony!), had to contain, beneath its ostensibly correct veneer, advice for his dying friends, a sort of response to their foolishly and almost aggressively entreating, shining, bewildered eyes. He knew that by the act of writing down the Danish king’s dreadful life he would be able to answer their question, quite simply, about how it was all connected.

So that nothing was left hanging in the air.

Love, they said to him in their thin and meagre voices, we can never explain. But do you not want to try? He had loved one of them. Perhaps now, despite her lopsided, drooling smile, she wants an answer. Sitting there, stooped but still enormously beautiful, with helpless questions hovering silently in the air between them.

Don’t you want to try! Don’t you want to try! Or else what use is everything we once tried? Have you forgotten?

So tiresom. . .