The Wandering Pine

by Per Olov Enquist, Deborah Bragan-Turner

Genres: General Fiction; Biographical; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

What was it about Hjoggböle, a farming village in the northernmost part of Sweden, that created so many idiots - and writers? There was nothing to indicate that P.O. Enquist would be stricken by an addiction to writing. Nothing in his family - honest, hardworking people. Not a trace of poetry. And yet he worked his way, via journalism, novels and plays, to the centre of Swedish politics and cultural life. His books garnered prize after prize. His plays ran for decades and premiered on Broadway. Why then, living with a new wife in Paris, does he hole up in their palatial Champes-Élysées apartment, talking only to his cat? How is it that he wakes to find himself in an uncoupled carriage on a railway siding in Hamburg, two - or was it three? - days after the first-night party finished? And what is it that drives him to run shoeless through the deep January snow of an Icelandic plain, leaving the lights of the drying out clinic far behind? Narrating in the third person, as if he were merely a character in the eventful, perplexing and ultimately triumphantly redemptive drama of his own life, P.O. Enquist is as elliptical as Karl Ove Knausgaard is exhaustive. Clear-eyed, rueful, written with elegance and humour, this is the singular story of a remarkable man.

Release date: July 24, 2018

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

December 1989, a clear Icelandic night. The stars are visible, but not the Northern Lights.

Where did they go?

*

At about four in the afternoon on 14 April 1998 he goes past the disused railway station in Skellefteå. He walks slowly, to avoid attention, and sees three men sitting on the steps.

He recognises him instantly. Jurma. Light rain is falling.

He feels an ache. It takes a few seconds before he realises what it is. Then, as ever, he begins to think about something else, a survival mechanism: he recalls a similar scene, from the film Philadelphia, or perhaps from Bruce Springsteen’s music video for the film. Springsteen is walking along a street next to a factory, through a desolate landscape, maybe the factory has closed down; he is walking slowly without turning round. You have the impression that the three men sitting watching him must have been his friends when he was young, but they have remained where they were, while he has moved on.

They did not call out to him to stay around.

As a general rule, the people left behind avoid the ones who move away. So what was it like to stay there? The three men outside the disused railway station in Skellefteå were sharing a bottle of wine, definitely not their first. Jurma had lifted his head when he saw him, a gesture of recognition, but then he looked down again, as if in shame or blind rage.

It made him ache. He could not believe he was not there as well. It was impossible to understand. A matter of chance, perhaps, or a miracle?

Is he afraid? He is afraid.

*

From Brighton, spring 1989, only the title of what is now certain to be a hopeless novel, and a short note.

Now, soon, my Benefactor, Captain Nemo, will tell me to open the water tanks, so that the vessel, with the library inside it, will sink.

I have been through the library, but not everything. Before, I secretly dreamed of collecting all of it together, so that it was all finished, closed. Finally to be able to say: this is how it was, this is how it happened, and this is the whole story.

But it would be against my better judgement. Against better judgement is a good technique for not giving up. If we had better judgement, we would give up.

The following day he went out in the car and drove for several hours between Skråmträsk, Långviken, Yttervik and Ragvaldsträsk, in order to summon up his courage.

The car was an Audi he had hired at Skellefteå airport, which was located right next to Gammelstället, by the lake, Bursjön: he was convinced that it was on the land his mother’s brother John had owned. You made the descent for landing, and there was the farm, 120 metres or so below; that was where he read the Bible to his maternal grandmother when she was dying.

He had, as always, looked out as they were about to land, to identify the geographical point from which his life could be viewed, and the young man in the seat next to him, in his thirties and wearing a serge suit, in other words his Fellow Traveller, had as usual also stretched forward to see and said, “So that’s what it looks like now,” and he had replied, “Yes, they’ve done a lot of building,” as if that had been perfectly natural. “Uncle John has gone now,” he had added, in explanation. “Really, him too?” the man, who had perhaps never flown before and never seen Gammelstället from above, had answered. “Well, there are not many left,” and with that there was not much more to be said.

*

The man on the bench outside the central station, whose name was Jurma, must have been about seventy. It was obvious that he had been on the booze for a long time.

Strange that he was still alive. Enough of that.

*

He borrows a rowing boat and rows out to Granholmen.

It is called something else now, named after his mother: Majaholmen. Strange, actually, it was his father who had built the cottage. She would sit there in the summertime and look out over the water.

You really should not delve into all of this. It will only drive you mad.

*

Of all creatures he loved dragonflies best.

They had been gone for a long time. In autumn 1989 he saw them again. In spring 1990 they were flying around like crazy and he could hardly contain himself. It was the resurrection of the dragonflies. How did that happen?

*

The letters.

He was going to clear out the attic and he found the bundles of letters, seven of them, all handwritten. He had been quite sure that he was on fire.

Was it so? All this. He could scarcely breathe.

Was it really so?

*

She had put the Toshiba on his knee, as if it were a puppy, and the other woman, Sanne, sat on the floor and put on his shoes for him.

You always hope for a miracle. If you do not have hope, you are not human. And surely you must be some sort of human.

*

Is it now? No, not yet.

The signs are very unclear.

Someone in the village tells the child, almost in a whisper, about the dream that Hugo Hedman had in the winter of 1935. In the dream three tall trees fell down. They were pine trees, but they had not been cut down deliberately. It was an omen. The same winter three men in the village died. The dream had been a sign. One of the dead men was apparently called Elof. Later the child understands that this man is not a “pine tree”, but his “father”; however, it is very confusing.

The second sign: his mother is pregnant, carrying the only-begotten son. At the same time: one of his father’s brothers is, while still very young, labelled “insane” and spends a period in solitary confinement, locked in the attic, as is the custom. He is not allowed visits from the mother, since she is with child, and moreover with this child, and secret rays emanating from a lunatic (“he looks crazy”) can damage the foetus in the womb. A few years later (possibly September 1939) he asks if that had indeed been the case; it is denied, he has not been harmed at all by anything the madman gave off. In any case it would only manifest itself later on, but it is unlikely. “Insanity” is, he learns, a kind of restlessness.

And so the years pass.

*

Suddenly he is aware that his mother is no longer crying.

He does not know what has happened, but it has stopped.

At first he assumes that she is happy now and no longer laments her widow’s loneliness. Then he suspects that the tears have simply dried up. She has obviously reached a turning point and they have run dry. She throws herself into her work, which is the school and voluntary work for Jesus. The former is a chore. Voluntary work for Jesus, she says, fills her with light.

Jesus my light.

That is her perspective. The child is filled with admiration.

The distance from the green house where they live to the school is five kilometres. No more weeping. It is as if she has given up, capitulated.

In winter, when the road through the forest cannot be kept cleared, they go on skis. Mother makes a track, he follows behind. It has to be done. She is, after all, a primary schoolteacher. A school with two classes, for infants and juniors. First a slight downhill slope from the green house, then over the stream, next a long, very windswept stretch over the fields by Hugo Renström’s, before going through the forest. The school serves two villages and is therefore placed halfway between the two, which means right in the middle of the forest; so everyone has to travel the same distance, perhaps too far, but on the other hand, no-one has an advantage. It is fair, but in winter the worst bit is against the wind on the flat before the forest.

Her life really gives her nothing to complain about.

*

She no longer writes her diary.

When he is clearing up after her death in the autumn of 1992 he finds something that resembles diaries, from the years immediately after training college. In them, odd indications on the calendar that before her marriage she certainly lived a devout life, but, to be honest, she also enjoyed herself. “Party at Gamla Fahlmark” or “Party at Långviken”. Party revelations cease with the engagement, the date is not clear.

She reiterates to her son the assertion that she is content, and that “the state’s rewards are small but secure”. However, she complains about women’s salaries, which are lower than those of male colleagues (equal pay is introduced in 1937, but she is far-sighted), and stresses the importance of every woman having a career because one day she might become a widow.

The possibility of divorce does not cross her mind.

*

Her political affiliation is without a doubt within the People’s Party.

She is a huge admirer of the party leader, Bertil Ohlin, who is a professor. She is deeply critical when Erlander, who is only a Bachelor of Arts, is insolent to Ohlin. She never suggests that the latter is handsome (the word “smart” does once escape her lips), but the child soon realises that her almost religious worship of this man Ohlin has undertones. Many years later, when pressed, she admits that his dead father had been a Social Democrat. No need to make too much of that, she implies. Before his departure from this world he was saved, after all. She does not elucidate. Because he was a stevedore in summer and a lumberjack in winter, she regards it as natural that he gave in to the peer pressure of the loading gang. She indicates that she never blamed him for his political preferences. When her son grows up and informs her that he too is a Social Democrat, she sighs heavily but says – with sarcasm or humour? he cannot make her out properly – that Well then, your Dad would be happy.

In every class she takes, she starts a choir. It is always three-part. This is where she is truly at home, in song. Her dedication to the People’s Party is more a matter of principle, not of emotion.

Eighty-seven years old and having suffered three minor strokes, she is to be found in the dark and in a heavy snowfall, walking south on the coast road, swaying from side to side in her characteristic way and wearing only one of her Lovikka mittens. She is purposeful, as if she is going to Umeå or Sundsvall.

It is seven o’clock on Christmas morning. Someone stops her; she says irritably that she is on her way to the local branch of the People’s Party in Bureå, they are having their annual meeting and she definitely does not intend to let them down. She is taken home and not castigated, because her sharp temper is well-known and no-one dares, even now, to contradict her.

It is her last, albeit abortive, political act. She considers the Norran to be the “liberal” local paper. That means social-liberal.

*

So what social class do she, the father and the boy belong to?

Sometime in 1944 school meals are introduced in Bureå parish, resulting in the children at the school being provided with a free lunch. However, it is means-tested for the first year and a financial assessment determines that all the children in Hjoggböle have the right to a free school meal apart from two, who belong to the privileged upper class. It is the school’s two teachers who are affected (“the state’s rewards are small but secure” and so on) – which means that he and Thorvald, the son of the junior schoolteacher, Ebba Hedman, are not given meals. Each lunchtime the pupils file up to the top floor of the school, temporarily equipped as a dining room, where his father’s sister Vilma – who will later be involved in the battle over the swapped children, the Enquist changeling story – serves good and nourishing meat broth.

The two upper-class children, Thorvald and himself, have to sit on the floor in the lower corridor and eat a sandwich of rye bread and margarine, which he detests, and drink skimmed milk.

He feels singled out, ashamed, and is boiling with indignation. It is fortunate that he has a good nature. After lunch, their hunger satisfied and with bright smiling faces, the children stream past the two teachers’ boys. His view of class conflict in society is now fixed. Yet he does not understand that the lower-class feeling he has is built on a misunderstanding; he is the one who is upper class.



He is not alone in trying to find out why things happened the way they did. The village too is researching into itself. There had to be some sort of coherence. Otherwise madness would ensue.

In the first half of the twentieth century Sweden is an archipelago of many thousands of small villages hidden in a sea of forests. Hjoggböle is no exception. The village preserves its history, which is long. Endless reports of people defeating poverty. At the village meeting on 1 May, 1885 it was decided that, to avoid the cost of lodgings, the widow Lovisa Andersson would go round the village with her children. Tax, one night at each household. It is a year of famine. People exchange their last possessions for flour. “A bucket, a leather sack, a metal container, a fur, four scythe handles; for this, 11 lbs of flour received.” Amusing little anecdotes he can leave out of his story: the minutes of the village meeting in May 1868 disclose that farmer Erik Andersson in Hjoggböle sent two boys into the forest to fetch bark for baking bread. On the way home the boys had to pass a field of cows. The cows were hungry and when they caught sight of the boys and the bark they were carrying, they crowded around them and ate the bark. The starving boys were unable to defend themselves and did not have the strength to go back to the forest. “Support issued, 2 lbs high-quality flour, 2 lbs low-quality.”

A happy outcome. They could go home without bark.

“In Sjön, Hjoggböle, a poorhouse has been built, consisting of one room; for the homeless.” Evidently many of them are soldiers’ widows, with children. The stone foundations of the poorhouse are still there in the mid ’50s. He often visits it, situated, as it is, right next to the bunker that he as a seven-year-old plans to use for shelter against infantry attacks backed by German tanks. The foundations are behind Anselm Andersson’s; when the Furuvallen football pitch was built there this memorial vanished.

Lutheran morals are already rife now, in the mid-nineteenth century. He recognises them. “Decision of the village meeting on 1 May”, according to paragraph 8, is to “impose a penalty of twenty-five kronor on anyone in the village allowing use of his house as an amusement parlour; the fine will be shared out to the poor in the village.”

Amusement parlour means dance hall.

One Olof Enqvist, however, is not among those who receive benefits – quite the reverse: when the house and mill in Forsen are sold at auction in May 1883 with all the contents, he buys the house for four kronor and five öre. Perhaps he pulls it down and makes use of the timber?

An uncle of a grandfather. He spells his name with qv.

*

Below the green house was the planing machine.

He cannot recall seeing the plane working when he was a child. They stopped using it sometime at the end of the ’30s. He tries to remember, but he fails.

The little building, the sawmill, was still there down by the stream throughout the ’40s. A very low, sagging structure. Was it open at the front, towards the road and where the milk was collected? He cannot recall a door.

Difficult to understand how the plane was operated. Had there been some sort of waterfall at the outlet to the lake, a difference in levels where the stream started, with a wheel? He finds an archive informing him that the engine driving the plane was a Säffle combustion engine, 7 horsepower, model 15, manufactured 1920.

Obviously it did not need hydropower. So why then was it in that particular place?

Was it because the timber was transported on the water?

The plane was by the outlet to the lake and only a hundred metres from the green house. As a child he was convinced that he was born at the very centre of Sweden, namely Sjön, Hjoggböle. Proof of this: the combination of the chapel and the milk churn stand and the stream and the bridge over the stream and, above all, the plane, existing as it did only as a relic and consequently deserving its own symbol on the map. Being born in the middle of the kingdom must not make you conceited; instead it carries a responsibility for people on the periphery. People who live south of Jörn. Or people in Skåne.

There was a great deal of sawdust left, even though the plane was no longer there, quite a large, flat, soggy heap of it. You could hunt for worms amongst the shavings.

Wasn’t there a hole in the sawmill floor? Straight down into the stream? He is determined to investigate and solve the mystery of the plane once and for all. He does not recall who owned it. Perhaps it was the Sehlstedts.

One of them. Maybe the one who carried the foot-end.

*

The village is ancient. It has been there since the Middle Ages.

When Gustav Vasa’s land register was drawn up in 1543 there were five tax-paying farmers in the village. They utilised 5.5 hectares. Unearthed finds included axes, greenstone arrowheads and a quartz dagger, which might be evidence of some sort of settlement from the period around 3,000 B.C.

He tries to imagine this, but fails. Nevertheless, he likes to think of himself as indigenous.

He returns in the summer and endeavours to create a reconstruction. In the middle of the ’40s the stream had not been drained and it was still pretty; there were roach in it. People did their washing down by the plane. The bridge over the stream remained for a long time, though the plane and with it all the machinery were removed.

He makes a note: the bridge has gone.

The most interesting thing about the bridge was the leeches. You could lie on your stomach and observe them. When you were bathing you had to be careful about the leeches; maybe they were horse leeches, but it made no difference, they lay rolled up on the bottom and then they unfurled and swam, wriggling. You really ought to have been afraid of them, because people said they could suck your blood until you lost consciousness and passed out; but if you spent time with them every day they became friends of sorts and you coaxed them up with long sticks and laid them out on the bridge.

It made a mess if you killed them. He therefore made the decision not to kill them, but become their friend. That way there was no need to be afraid.

*

You could view the village in many ways, depending on where the centre was.

The obvious answer was that the milk stand and planing machine and leeches represented the centre of the village, and that made him happy, without making him too big for his boots.

He is at the centre, but maintains his humility.

Sometimes the villagers congregate at the milk stand for a meeting and then there will be twenty or so men down there, no women, conducting indignant discussions that almost always concern some outrage the dairy in Bureå is guilty of. It is something about the returns of skimmed milk. The bosses at the dairy have committed some indefensible infringement of their rights. Difficult to understand. He asks his mother, but she just sniffs.

Otherwise his mother is a great supporter of meetings, at least the ones held in the chapel. Those are under her control. The meetings at the milk stand irritate her, because they are worldly, and because no women attend. For her, the chapel is the centre; she would emphatically refute that the plane, milk stand and leeches were a centre.

She is of the opinion that, since it is the women in every family who make the decisions, the meetings at the milk stand are a worldly pretence. Pure theatre, as the real power in the village is with the women, who are not shrieking at the milking stool.

And the commotion at the milk stand, when the men were shouting that enough was enough and now there had to be a milk strike – it never actually happened. All was quiet the day after. But if all those who really took the decisions, in the home, if all those women had been there! Perhaps there would have been a result then. Because they knew what real life was. And they were used to running things.

The milk stand has gone too.

He records in August 2003 that the lake has retreated. It is almost invisible from the green house. That time in the ’30s they skied all the way down to the planing machine. Once a year they gathered to clear the brushwood so that the mirror of water, so beloved and admired by all, could shimmer clearly. Now the brushwood is completely thick. It is as if the eye of the village has grown over, the eyelashes stuck together. Otherwise it is pretty.

Now you can make it into town in twenty minutes. Gardens are tended.

*

The village is ancient; he would like to imagine it as a moss-covered stump.

Yet it is breathing, very slowly, almost laboriously, like a dying woman, rather like his mother in the hours before she was taken to our Saviour in October 1991 and he sat with her, moistening her lips. When he visits the village as an adult, everything has changed; no moss, no prehistoric stump. He has to tilt his ear towards the village and hold his breath, so he can hear the distant calls.

Someone is whispering, he has to make it all connect, otherwise he will go mad.



In time he finds out that he had a brother who was born before him, a year and a half after the wedding.

She had wanted to give birth at home. The baby was the wrong way round, but on a cursory visit the midwife had taken exception to her excessive wailing and had said that the child would turn the right way of its own accord. Despite the labour pains, the infant did not come out. His mother had been lying there, groaning, for four days and nights until it was impossible to hold her down, she had screamed so terribly! It was a breech presentation. Then someone ordered a taxi from Gamla Fahlmark. She had been in bed on the top floor of the green house and the midwife had not come back again because she did not have the energy. So his mother had been carried down by his father and a neighbour, Sehlstedt. There were two of them to carry her down the stairs. Åke Sehlstedt had told him this, furtively, with one single detail: “I carried the foot-end.”

Inexplicable that this sentence should lodge in his memory. He cannot be free of it.

He ponders on whether this was an image or a sign.

But it was a breech presentation. In the cottage hospital the baby eventually arrived and had the umbilical cord around his neck. It was thought that he lived for a few moments. A note about this in the diary. Consequently he was officially born alive and not stillborn. The swiftly departed had been baptised Per-Ola and his body photographed in the coffin. There had to be pictures of the body, that was obligatory. The corpse looked wise and he also seemed kind.

Two years later he himself was born and at the baptism was given the same name. His mother had explained that it was the earlier baby, with the name Per-Ola, who had died, whereas it was the later child, in other words him, with the same name, who lived. He finds it hard to know who is who. He senses something obscure, slightly suspicious. In that case, could it be that in actual fact he was the corpse photographed in the coffin, and it was his brother who lived?

Perhaps they had been exchanged.

He dare not ask, but feels uneasy. Or was it the same child all the time? In other words, he himself had died, and nearly cost his mother her life, in order to be resurrected. Or, and this was the most difficult: was it the case that in his first life he had been raised up amongst the righteous and now sat at God’s right hand, whilst afterwards becoming the child, the one who was singled out as Per-Ola, with the same name!!! – and that this one, born into the world later on, was among the unrighteous sinners left to burn in hell on Judgement Day?

*

It becomes even more unclear when an exchange of babies actually does take place in the family.

This time it was Aunt Vilma who gave birth in Bureå cottage hospital. The nurse came in with a baby in each arm, both one day old; and in a sharp voice she had said to Aunt Vilma and Mrs Svensson, “Can’t you recognise your own children!?”

But they could not, and so a mistake was made.

That was the Enquist baby mix-up. And some years later there was a big fuss about it in the press as far south as Stockholm and it even went to the Supreme Court. That was how it started. First the uncertainty about whether it was he himself who had died, or whether it was his brother. And then the story about the babies switched at birth. An affirmation of how uncertain everything was. Just look at Aunt Vilma and what went wrong with the newborn babies!!!

You never knew for certain who was who. Or who you were.

It was scary. Then a rumour began to spread. It was much later, but long before he wrote Captain Nemo’s Library about Eeva-Lisa and the changelings, and then he put the record straight about the scandal in the village by explaining it in the form of a novel. He wanted to make everything clear by presenting the objective truth about the swap, so that people would stop making things up.

The rumour was that, in actual fact, it was he who had been switched at Bureå cottage hospital. He was alarmed. What on earth could this mean? That perhaps it was his dead brother, the corpse in the coffin, who had written the books? No, that it was he who had penned them, but in his brother’s name. He was upset that the two mix-ups were being confused.

In any event: he was someone else.

Some people said they knew for certain that Enquist had been swapped at birth. He was shaken, but he pulled himself together. However, it reinforced the feeling of insecurity he had experienced as a child. You could not be sure. He denied it, but not convincingly. He was not even sure himself. He began to agonise over whether it could be true, first as a joke, but soon it was not funny.

Sometimes you do not know yourself.

*

And his mother?

She would certainly be very nervous if he asked, like a skittish horse. But he would never have asked her which of the brothers had lived and which had died. And in that case what she thought of the first, dead son, or which of the two she liked better.

Perhaps the answer lay in a notebook he found after her death, in which she makes things clear. After the first birth she writes in it: “Despite what has happened I still know that I have at least been a mother once.” Not a word more. He found it hard to make sense of this. Did she not believe she could have another baby? Or did she not want to? Had she given up, thus giving him up?

I have at least been a mother once! She must have meant for the minute the child was alive. That was the only reasonable interpretation. He understands that motherhood was important to her. Maybe it was shameful to be married and childless. Better to have been born and then perish, from croup, for example, which turned them blue. Croup had taken Grandmother Lova’s six brothers and sisters. All of them had turned blue.

But the minute for which the dead boy had been alive made the difference for her. It made her a woman.

*

In his opinion she has an almost angelic appearance, or is, at any rate, unequivocally beautiful.

However, her beauty is distorted in a strange way when he faces a life-threatening illness and the removal of his tonsils. It happens at Bureå cottage hospital. He learns that the person operating on him will be Dr Hultman, the same man who attended his father when he was cut open and died.

This doctor, his father’s assassin, is now leaning over him and lowering into his throat a steel pincer that will whip out his tonsils. It must have been like this for his father! And for the ghost boy who was possibly himself who was forced out by this same doctor with his umbilical cord round his slender neck! The doctor’s grotesquely gaping face comes towards him and he rips the pieces of flesh from his shrieking mouth. He knows he is the third person exposed to the mortal danger of this face: first the ghost boy baptised Per-Ola, then his father and now him.

His life is saved, however, and he has to stay in for a week. There is the threat of an epidemic (scarlet fever?) and no patients at Bureå cottage hospital are allowed visitors. But his mother cycles into the regional centre every day and bangs on his window. Her face is contorted with worry, as if she is trying to call in to the one in distress; it has none of her normal beauty, now it is twisted with fear and confirms his anguished suspicions about Doctor Death.

She scratches on the window to attract his attention, like a bird, shut out; against the window, with its wings.



The survivor, in so far as he is this person, is regarded generally in the village as good-natured.

He hears it often and becomes accustomed to it. He is good. His gentleness radiates from childhood photographs, and his glowing kindliness. He finds it natural that he is good, but often daydreams about how things would be if he were not good. In those circumstances he would receive a beating, everyone knew that. He has not experienced anything of that sort; he knows that his mother would dispense corporal punishment only after a hard struggle with herself and only if serious sins had been committed.

He gives some thought to how it would feel. Since corporal punishment is something that is in effect completely forbidden, he begins to hanker after a taste of it, just once. It becomes an unattainable goal he is more and more obsessed with.

One day he unexpectedly achieves his objective. He has done something. What it is he has done he later suppresses, but his mother decides to punish him, by spanking his bare behind. He screams hysterically afte