He had no idea who Adolf was and had never heard of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nor did he have any need to know. He was a medicine man in a remote village on the Kenyan savanna. He left so few impressions in the iron-rich red soil that his name is no longer remembered.
He was skilled in the art of healing, but his good reputation reached beyond his valley just as little as the events of the world outside reached in. He lived an unassuming life. Died too soon. Despite his great skill, he was unable to cure himself when he needed it the most. He was grieved and missed by a small but faithful assortment of patients.
His oldest son was rather too young to take over, but that was how it worked, that was how it had been throughout the ages, and so it would remain.
At just twenty years old, the successor had an even more negligible reputation. He inherited his father’s relative competence but none of his good-naturedness. Being satisfied with small mercies for the rest of his life was not for him.
His transformation into something else began when the young man built a new hut in which to receive patients, one that had a separate waiting room. It progressed with his exchanging his shúkà for a white coat and was fully realized when he changed both his name and his title. The son of the medicine man whose name no one remembers any longer began to call himself Dr Ole Mbatian after that fabled man of the same name, the greatest Maasai of them all, the leader and visionary. The original was long dead and offered no protest from the other side.
Tossed out along with all the old ways was his father’s price list for treatments. The son drafted his own, one that did the great warrior justice. It would no longer do to drop by with a bag of tea leaves or a piece of dried meat as payment, not if you expected the doctor to have time for you. These days a simple matter cost one hen to treat; the more complicated ones required a goat. For truly serious cases, the doctor demanded a cow. If it wasn’t too serious, that is; a patient who died got to do so for free.
Time passed. The medicine men of the nearby villages closed down their clinics, driven out by the competition on account of the fact that they still went by the same old names they always had and insisted that a true Maasai did not dress himself in white. As Dr Ole Mbatian’s list of patients grew, so did his reputation. His paddock of cows and goats needed constant expanding. The clientele on whom he could test his decoctions was so large that Ole became as skilled as people were starting to say he was.
The medicine man with the stolen name was already wealthy by the time he celebrated the arrival of his first son. The baby survived those critical first years and was, in accordance with tradition, trained in his father’s work. Ole the Second spent many years alongside his father before the latter passed away. When the day arrived, he kept his father’s stolen name but did away with the title of ‘Doctor’ and burned the white coat, since patients who had come from far away had testified that doctors, in contrast to medicine men, might be associated with witchcraft. A medicine man who developed the reputation of being a witch would not enjoy many more days in his career, or even his life.
Thus, after Dr Ole Mbatian came Ole Mbatian the Elder. His firstborn son, who grew up and took over from his father and grandfather, was, in turn, Ole Mbatian the Younger.
And it is with him that this tale begins.
Ole Mbatian the Younger, then, had inherited his name, wealth, reputation and talents from his father and grandfather. In another part of the world, this would have been called being born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
His educational journey was overseen with care and, along with friends in his age set, he also got to take a detour through warrior training. He was thus not only a medicine man but also a highly esteemed Maasai warrior. No one knew more about the healing powers of roots and herbs, and only a very few could measure up to Ole when it came to spears, throwing clubs, and knives.
His medical speciality was the prevention of more children than a family wished to have. Unhappy women flocked his way from Migori in the west to Maji Moto in the east, several days’ travel away. To have time to see them all he had an admission policy of at least five previously delivered children per applying woman, of which at least two must be boys. The medicine man never revealed his formulas, but it was easy to tell that bitter melon was an active ingredient in the cloudy liquid the woman must drink each time she ovulated. Those with extra-sensitive tastebuds could also detect a hint of the root of Indian cotton.
Ole Mbatian the Younger was richer than everyone else, including Chief Olemeeli the Well-Travelled. Besides all his cows he had three huts and two wives. It was the other way around for the chief: two huts and three wives. Ole never understood how he made that work.
Incidentally, the medicine man had never liked his chief. They were the same age and even as children they knew which roles they would one day shoulder.
‘My dad rules over your dad,’ Olemeeli might say to tease him.
He wasn’t wrong, even as Ole Jr preferred not to lose in an argument against him. Instead he solved the issue by whacking the future chief in the face with his throwing club, leaving Ole Mbatian the Elder no choice but to vociferously give his son a licking even as he whispered words of praise in the boy’s ear.
Back then, it was Kakenya the Handsome who ruled the valley. He was secretly plagued by the realization that his epithet was not only accurate but in every meaningful way the sole admirable trait he possessed. He was no less concerned that the son who would one day take over appeared to have inherited his father’s shortcomings, but not exactly his physical beauty. And it didn’t help young Olemeeli’s appearance that the medicine man’s boy had knocked out two of his front teeth.
Kakenya the Handsome had an endlessly difficult time making decisions. He even let his wives decide for him now and then, but unfortunately he had an even number of them. Each time they were unable to agree on an issue (which was almost every time) he stood there with his tie-breaking vote and no idea what to do with it.
Yet in the autumn of his old age, and with the support of his whole family, Kakenya managed to accomplish something he could be proud of. He would send his oldest son on journeys; he would go much further than anyone had done before. He would, as a result, become well-travelled and return home full of impressions from the outside world. The wisdom he gathered on his journey would be a help to him when it became time for him to take over. Olemeeli would never be as handsome as his father, but he could become a resolute and forward-looking chief.
That was the plan.
Now, things don’t always turn out the way one intends. Olemeeli’s first and last long journey was to Loiyangalani, on his father’s orders. The destination was chosen not only because it was almost further away than what was reasonably possible, but also because there were rumours that people had discovered, way up there in the north, a new way to filter lake water. Heated sand and herbs rich in vitamin C mixed with root of water lily had long been the known methods. But apparently, in Loiyangalani, they had come up with some new way that was both simpler and more effective.
‘Go there, my son,’ said Kakenya the Handsome. ‘Gain knowledge from all the new things you encounter along the way. Then come home and prepare yourself. I feel that I don’t have much time left.’
‘But Dad,’ said Olemeeli.
He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He seldom found the right words. Or the right thought.
His journey took half an eternity. Or a whole week. Once he arrived at his destination, Olemeeli discovered that the people in Loiyangalani were advanced in many ways. Water purification was one of them. But they’d also installed something called electricity, and the mayor used a machine, rather than a pen or piece of chalk, to write letters.
Olemeeli really just wanted to go back home, but his father’s words echoed in his mind. So he made a careful study of one thing and the next; he owed his father at least that much. Unfortunately, he tried out the electricity to such an extent that he got a shock and passed out.
When he regained consciousness, he took a few minutes to recover before tackling the typewriter. But there Olemeeli fared so poorly as to get his left index finger stuck between the d and r keys, frightening him so badly that he yanked his hand away with such force that his finger broke in two places.
Enough was enough. Olemeeli ordered his assistants to pack their bags for the arduous journey home. He already knew what he would say in his report to his father Kakenya: it was bad enough that electricity could bite you just because you stuck a nail into a hole in the wall. But the writing machine was downright lethal.
Kakenya the Handsome had seldom been accurate in his prophecies. But the suspicion that he didn’t have much time left turned out to be correct. His terrified and partially toothless son took over.
Newly minted Chief Olemeeli passed down three decrees on the very first day after his father’s burial.
One: the thing called electricity must never, ever be installed in the valley over which Olemeeli ruled.
Two: machines for writing were not to be transported over the border, and
Three: the village would be investing in a brand-new water purification system.
So it came to be that for almost four decades, Olemeeli had been ruling over the only valley in Maasai Mara where electricity, typewriters, and by extension, computers, did not exist. It became the valley where not a single one of the six billion cell phone owners on earth happened to live.
He called himself Olemeeli the Well-Travelled. He was as unpopular as his father had once been. Behind his back he had a number of less flattering names. Ole Mbatian the Younger’s favourite was ‘Chief Toothless’.
The not-at-all-well-liked chief and the admittedly skilful medicine man may have been the same age, but that didn’t mean they were of the same mind. Yet, given that they were the two most important men in the village, it wouldn’t do for them to quarrel as they had when they were younger. Ole Mbatian had to come to terms with the fact that the greatest Luddite of them all was also the one in charge. In return, Olemeeli the Well-Travelled pretended not to hear when the medicine man pointed out which of them had the most teeth left in his mouth.
The chief was a constant but tolerable concern for Ole Mbatian. His only true sorrow in life lay elsewhere: namely in the fact that he had had four children with his first wife and four with his second – eight daughters and no sons. After the fourth girl he began to experiment with his herbs and roots to make sure the next baby was a boy. But this was one medical challenge that proved beyond his capabilities. The daughters kept coming until they didn’t come at all. His wives stopped delivering, even without any bitter melon or Indian cotton figured into the mixtures Ole Mbatian had tried.
After five generations of medicine men, the next man in line would be someone other than a Mbatian, or whatever they had been called before. Female medicine men didn’t exist in the Maasai world. It’s all in the name.
For a long time, Ole was able to find solace in the fact that Chief Toothless fared no better in the production of children. Olemeeli had six daughters right alongside Ole’s eight.
But then there was this part where the chief had an extra wife to turn to. Before the youngest wife got too old, she produced a son and the heir to her husband and chief. Great celebration in the village! The proud father announced that the festivities would last all night. And so they did. Everyone partied until dawn, except for the medicine man, who had a headache and retired early.
That was many years ago now. Many more than what Ole expected he had left. But he wasn’t ready to meet the Supreme God yet. He still had more to give. He didn’t know exactly how old he had become, but he noticed he wasn’t quite as good with a bow and arrow as he had once been and couldn’t hit a target quite as accurately with his spear, throwing club, or knife. Maybe with the throwing club, now that he thought about it. After all, he was the reigning village champion.
There wasn’t anything much wrong with his agility either. He moved with nearly as much confidence as always. If not as willingly. He was getting lazy. Had toothaches. And cures for toothaches. His vision was cloudier than it had been in his youth, but that didn’t seem like a problem. Ole had already seen everything worth seeing and he could find his way to wherever he needed to go.
All in all, there were indications that one stage of life had made way for another. Or, alternately, that Ole Mbatian was depressed. When his sorrow over the son that never was got too tight a grip on him, he mixed himself up some St John’s wort and roseroot in sunflower oil. That usually helped.
Or he took an extra walk in the savanna. He was out early each morning, thanks to his constant search for fresh roots and herbs for his medicine cabinet. He worked before the sun got too hot, beginning his walks while it was still dark. Alert to any noises from nearly silent lions that might be out hunting.
Was his stride getting shorter, perhaps? Ole had once gone as far as Nanyki. Another time he’d made it all the way to Kilimanjaro and on up the mountain. Now it felt as if the neighbouring villages were far away. There was nothing to suggest that Ole Mbatian the Younger would one day, in the not-too-distant future, cause a considerable uproar in Stockholm, Europe and the world. The Maasai who knew so much about how to distil the healing powers of the savanna knew nothing of the Swedish capital city or the continent to which it belonged. And of the world he knew nothing beyond that it had been created by En-Kai, the Supreme God, who lived in the mountain Kirinyaga. Ole Mbatian called himself a Christian, but there were some truths the Bible couldn’t change. One of them was the story of creation.
‘Oh well,’ he said to himself.
The upshot of all of this was simply that he had to fight a little longer. And in good spirits, all things considered.
Just over ten thousand kilometres north of the Maasai lands, in a suburb of the Swedish capital city of Stockholm, Lasse handed the keys over to the buyer of his life’s work. It was time to retire.
This was no big deal for the former hot-dog stand owner. You were born, you pulled your weight, you retired, you died, you were buried. That was all there was to it.
But it was a big deal – and a terrible one at that – for one of his regulars. Just think, Lasse had sold his stand to an Arab. One who didn’t know what Västervik mustard was. Or that the hot dogs go on top of the mashed potatoes. One who added kebab to the menu.
That sort of change would leave its mark on anyone. Victor was only fifteen when it happened. Hanging around outside the hot-dog stand with his moped was no longer what it had been.
His friends designated the new pizzeria across the square their new hangout spot, but of course that was run by another Arab.
There was something about those Arabs. And the Iranians. The Iraqis. The Yugoslavians. None of them knew what Västervik mustard was. They dressed weird. Talked weird. Couldn’t they learn proper Swedish?
That was his first problem. The second was that his friends didn’t see what he saw. They switched to the pizzeria from the hot-dog stand not because hot dogs had become kebab, but because it was so much warmer indoors. When Victor tried to make them see that Sweden was about to be transformed, they sneered at him. Wasn’t life simply more interesting with a Yugoslavian or Iranian here and there?
Victor was alone in his ponderings. When his friends went to a disco, he sat home alone in his childhood room. When his friends played football on the weekends, he went to the museum. There he found comfort in what was authentically Swedish, like French Rococo and the Neoclassicism King Gustav III had brought to Sweden from Italy. But above all, he loved national romanticism: nothing could be more beautiful than Anders Zorn’s Midsummer Dance; nothing more tinged with solemnity than the funeral procession of King Karl XII as depicted by Gustaf Cederström.
The opposite of kebab.
His upper-secondary school years were torture. The boys in his class thought he was strange for learning the succession of Swedish monarchs by heart, from the eighth century onward. For his part, he thought those boys were uninteresting. And the girls … well, there was something wrong with them. Some had a cloth wrapped around their heads; he wanted nothing to do with those ones. But even the ones who were real Swedes … it was hard to talk to them. What were they supposed to talk about? How did you get close to someone without necessarily letting her get close to you?
His military service came as something of a relief. Twelve months of rules and regulations in service to the nation. But not even the Swedish armed forces were spared from the foreigners. Or the women.
As a young adult, Victor considered a career in politics. He subscribed to Folktribunen, a newspaper published by Nazis that essentially clung to the same truths he did. He went to a meeting or two with what he assumed were like-minded people but didn’t feel comfortable there. They wanted to bring about change with violence, but that presupposed that you were prepared to fight, which in turn might hurt. Victor had been quite familiar with the concept of pain ever since the time three hundred kronor went missing from his father’s wallet. His father had no proof Victor had taken it, but he gave the fifteen-year-old a proper thrashing anyway. The point at issue was not something the son wished to rehash with himself afterwards.
The party Victor considered joining had both leaders and vice-leaders, but he himself was on the bottom rung. Within the group you were expected to obey and cooperate. Not just other men, but women too. How could you work with those? And how could you obey them?
His conclusion was that Sweden was lost, unless his temporary friends in the resistance movement succeeded in their revolution. Or unless he himself took charge of things – without getting beaten up or thrown in jail along the way. Although Sweden was in a state of general decay, it was still possible to find success in the country, unlike in the party, where you had to show consideration. That was just about Victor’s least favourite word. Consideration for the party leader, his vice-leader, his wife and his cat. It was with determination, not consideration, that one would protect Sweden from the parasites.
The single twenty-year-old did not owe anything to anyone. He planned to fight his way to the top, whence he could allow his lack of consideration to blossom.
It could take time if it must, and it didn’t matter a whit if it happened at the expense of other people. Precisely which top he fought to didn’t matter either, as long as it was sufficiently high.
His climb began with getting a job with the most respectable art gallery in Stockholm. After all, he knew quite a bit about real art, and during his interview he managed to pepper art dealer Alderheim with lies about how much he appreciated the abominable modernism. To be on the safe side, he studied up on the topic before the interview, so he could say things like:
‘It’s not easy to sit here before the city’s greatest art dealer and express the true function of thought.’
Here he was alluding to the founder of surrealism, about whom his intended employer luckily inquired no further since Victor had forgotten his name. What he did recall was that he had been a leftist poet and the founder of an anti-fascist group. In short, an idiot.
His art-world plan was not a random one. Victor had thought this out carefully: Anyone who wanted to enact change needed a position. Beating up a homosexual or scaring the daylights out of a foreigner might be a worthy act, but it wouldn’t lead to any change to speak of. Except for that particular homosexual or foreigner.
And the way to rise to a position was to move in the right circles. Thus Victor needed to seek out money and power. Starting from the bottom rungs of industry would be as hopeless as doing so in politics.
The art gallery was a perfect springboard, for if there was one thing that united the members of the social-liberal power elite it was opera, theatre – and art. And especially the modernist claptrap Alderheim sold. Victor would get to know the clientele, and it would only be a matter of time before he was offered something better.
The work itself involved taking on most of the client-facing responsibilities. Victor negotiated the right to call himself the manager. Alderheim had originally imagined more of an assistant, but the fellow was old, tired, and easily swayed. The manager’s most important duty was to make the client like the art by liking him.
‘I’m really a Cézanne deep down inside,’ he might say with a smile that was confident and yet bashful. ‘But I must confess that I find myself drawn to Matisse.’
And he would fill in a little nonsense, such as:
‘Good old Matisse …’
He kept the rest of the sentence to himself (‘… may he burn in hell’).
Perhaps the clientele imagined that the manager was caught somewhere between impressionism and expressionism, when in fact he was simply sticking to his plan.
Alderheim was dazzled by the manager’s charm. This new guy was starting to feel more and more like the son he’d never had.
In those days, Victor’s last name was still the extremely ordinary Svensson. Even so, a customer might occasionally invite him to a gallery opening or something else as excruciating as it was crucial. He made sure to be where he was meant to be when he was meant to be there. Biding his time, alert to every key that would lead him ever upwards.
He gave himself two years. If he didn’t get a bite before then he would simply quit and reconsider. He never would have imagined that everything was going to work out on its own. The future came to him, no need to track it down. Her name was Jenny.
Woman was everything Victor despised. She was incomprehensible, weak, and emotional. He availed himself of what few advantages she did possess by visiting a high-end prostitute at one of Stockholm’s finer hotels once a week. The benefit of high-end service was that he could pay by invoice. And that ‘sex’ could be termed ‘frames’, ‘oil cloth’, or some other suitable item. He did not consider the opposite sex able to provide any other sort of happiness. Except …
Victor noticed that when it came to his daughter, Old Man Alderheim had got a notion in his head early on. She had hardly accomplished more than learning to walk when Victor arrived on the scene. He was nineteen years and nine months older than her. It would take patience on his part. And continued support from the old man, who was himself twenty-five years older than his own suspicious witch of a wife. Who might eventually have turned out to be a spanner in the works of this arrangement, if she hadn’t removed herself from the equation along the way.
Jenny grew up, which is not to say she became attractive in the least. She crept along the walls. Radiated nothing. Dressed badly.
But she was an Alderheim. And one day she would inherit the place. A relationship between her and Victor could bring him both a distinguished surname and, eventually, the whole business.
Yet there was the problem with the old witch. Victor suspected she was a member of the Left Party, because she believed it was up to Jenny herself to seek and find love. And she questioned the manager’s emotional engagement and loyalty. She wasn’t wrong, so it was a good thing she kicked the bucket.
It only took a few days. Cancer riddled her body. She hadn’t said a word about being in pain, just stopped getting out of bed on Monday. Was carried off on Wednesday. Buried a week later.
Once the old witch was gone, the ageing proprietor spent his days up in the apartment, grieving for days gone by. In the evenings he had Jenny light a fire in the library with its leather armchairs, his favourite works of art on the wall, and the big aquarium.
There he invited his intended son-in-law to share some cognac. It sometimes turned into quite a few snifters each week, but the drink was good and so was his objective. During the day, Victor dealt with the clientele, his lies and elegance ever increasing, as he bossed little Jenny around a sufficient amount.
Alderheim’s daughter turned twelve, fourteen, and fifteen. She never complained and didn’t seem to hang out with anyone at all. She approached new tasks with the same neutral expression as always. In time, she took over all the cleaning both in the apartment and the store. This way, Victor was spared from paying the wages of a part-time job. He used the savings to buy a little more sex without creating an obvious difference in the final expense tally. He also put Jenny to work in the boring archives in the cellar, which was where she preferred to spend time anyway. She even smelled like an archive.
Just as everything seemed to be smooth sailing, he was struck by a bolt of lightning in the form of one of the prostitutes from his past! All of a sudden she appeared in the store with a teenage boy at her side.
‘His name is Kevin,’ she said.
‘So?’ said Victor.
The woman asked the boy to go wait for her on the sidewalk. Once he was out of earshot, she said:
‘He’s your son.’
‘My son? He’s fucking black.’
‘Perhaps if you take a closer look at me you’ll understand how such a thing could happen.’
The woman didn’t blame herself. It wasn’t in her job description to assess the character of an individual client before doing business with him. And there was only one rule beyond that: anyone who hit her was not allowed back; anyone who didn’t hit her was welcome as long as they paid up. The man across from her had belonged to the latter category.
Victor had to close the store and get the lying woman and her son out of there before Jenny emerged from the archives. The old man was, as usual, up in his six-bedroom apartment and could neither see nor hear them.
With brand-new yet extremely debatable knowledge of his fatherhood, Victor herded mother and child to a café a few blocks away (it was ridiculous how much she’d gone downhill in just a few years). He asked what she wanted from him.
She wanted the worst thing of all. For him to take responsibility as a father. She hadn’t said a word about Kevin’s existence for all these years, but a hard life had taken its toll on her and now she needed help. Plus, the boy deserved a dad.
If only it had been about money.
‘What do you mean, help?’ he asked.
‘I’m sick.’
‘What do you mean?’
The woman fell silent. Kevin’s ears were full of music, but to be safe she sent him to the stand across the street to buy some candy. And said:
‘I’m going to die.’
‘Everyone is.’
More silence at the table, before the woman spoke again.
‘I’ve got AIDS.’
Victor shoved his chair back.
‘Oh, shit!’
He wanted to deny it all, but it was possible that the plague-stricken woman had circumstances on her side. And she had shown up at the precise moment she shouldn’t have, in regards to Victor’s life plan.
He couldn’t simply chase her off. For as long as she lived, she might pop up in the shop unannounced to spit blood or talk fatherhood with anyone at all.
As long as she lived, that is. Which, happily, seemed like it might not be very long at all.
Therefore, the key concepts would be ‘buying time’ and ‘harm reduction’.
In the ensuing negotiations with the dying mother, Victor promised to take responsibility for the kid until he was of age, given that the mother promised never to use the word ‘father’ in earshot of the kid. Or any other time, either.
‘The kid?’ said the woman. ‘He has a name. Kevin.’
‘Don’t split hairs.’
While Kevin’s mother was busy withering away, Victor took a week’s vacation. The increasingly decrepit Old Man Alderheim had to get off his arse and be useful for the first time in years. The manager rented a studio apartment in one of the most distant of all of Stockholm’s southern suburbs, a place where he could hide his sudden problem. Eighteen square metres, a bed, a kitchenette, two chairs and a table.
He sat the kid down on one of the chairs, himself on the other, and informed him of the rules.
Number one was that Kevin must never get it into his head that Victor was his father. He had taken on this responsibility out of the goodness of his heart since Kevin’s irresponsible mother was planning to die. Guardian would be a fitting title, but if that seemed awkward then ‘boss’ would do.
The boy nodded, although he’d never had a boss in his life. Nor a guardian, for that matter. And definitely not a father.
Number two was that Kevin must never come track down Victor in the city. He lived here in Bollmora and would go to the nearby upper-secondary school every day, and then come home. If he did as he was told, the boss promised to make sure there was always pizza in the fridge.
Kevin wondered how his mother was doing.
‘The hell with that, listen to me. This is important.’
The immediate crisis was averted. And when the troublesome woman died a week or so later, everything could go back to normal. Kevin behaved himself, didn’t make any trouble at school, didn’t complain about the food. And above all: he never came to the art gallery. It was almost as if he didn’t exist, which of course would have been preferable.
Jenny turned sixteen and then seventeen and eighteen, all as Victor couldn’t come up with a single sexual reason to touch her. But nor was that the point. They only had to get married.
The old man was an excellent marriage broker. Each day he worked on his essentially apathetic daughter. Sometimes so vociferously that Victor could hear him from a distance. Alderheim’s argument was that he wanted his life’s work to live on after his death; that Jenny was too young and inexperienced to shoulder the responsibility; that Victor, on the other hand, was a mature and responsible man. A secure man, even. Did Jenny suppose she could develop any feelings for him?
Her response was not audible from the next room. To find any creature more taciturn than Jenny you would have to look in the old man’s aquarium.
It would all work out with the girl. The problem with the bastard in Bollmora, however, was a thorn in his side. Time passed and the day approached when Kevin would turn eighteen. Once the boy was of age, Victor would no longer be able to control him. Then he would make a fuss. Victor had no faith in the inherent goodness of humankind; the only person he trusted was himself. There was no way of knowing whether it would be a month, six months, or a year; the only certainty was that Kevin would one day stand before him and demand Victor’s money. First a hundred kronor for some minor thing, then more for a bicycle, then even more for a car, for study abroad, for a house of his own … Once the boy learned that Victor was a fee-free ATM, it would never end.
Shit.
The manager needed to focus on charming the old man, pretending to flirt with and eventually proposing to Jenny, and making sure that fruitcake said yes. A peep out of Kevin in Bollmora would bring everything crashing down. Victor had known it for ages; it was only a matter of time before the kid would figure it out for himself.
Murder was out of the question. But what if the boy died anyway? That would be a different story. The problem was that eighteen-year-old boys don’t just do that out of the blue. Kevin would need some help along the way.
Victor recalled the resistance movement he’d had dealings with many years before. You had to hand it to them for plodding on. At regular intervals, one or two of them would be locked up for assault, violent rioting, incitement to racial hatred, weapons violations, and a few other things. In between times, they honed their party platform. In many ways, they held the correct views. One of the first things they wanted to do once they’d quarrelled their way to power was send everyone who didn’t belong here back where they came from. Iranians to Iran, Iraqis to Iraq, Yugoslavians to … well, that one was trickier. But in all certainty, Kevin would end up in Africa.
That was a lovely thought. The problem was, he couldn’t wait for the resistance movement’s revolution. How many of them could possibly be working to make it happen? A hundred? Two hundred? And half of them were in prison.
No, as usual, he was on his own.
He thought about this Africa thing.
Then he thought a little more and took a respectable old atlas from Alderheim’s bookshelf.
He ran his index finger slowly across the continent of Africa until it almost stopped of its own accord. And then he made up his mind.
A place for everything, and everything in its place.
‘Hello there, Kevin. I see you’re out of pizza.’
‘Hi, boss.’
Victor nodded, pleased. The boy knew the rules and was sticking to them. A well-mannered boy. Black, but well-mannered.
‘You’ll be eighteen soon.’
‘Today, actually.’
‘There you go. I thought we could celebrate with a trip next week. It must get boring, being stuck in Bollmora all the time.’
A trip sounded fantastic. Kevin was happy here, though, thought it was nice, and after all the boss had said he was never to come into the city.
‘Great, so you understand. But now it so happens I have business in Nairobi. Wouldn’t you like to come along? Have a look around?’
‘Nairobi?’ said the boy.
‘Kenya,’ said Victor.
In that moment, Kevin felt for the first time that there was something between them, almost like the boss was more than just a boss. He was prickly, and sometimes downright unpleasant, but deep down? They were going on a big trip together. To discover the world together. To be together.
‘Thanks, Dad …’ Kevin let slip.
Not that he thought it might be true, but he was lacking such a person in his life.
‘Don’t call me Dad!’
It took a few days to tidy up the most in-the-way pizza boxes and arrange for passports and tickets. Victor booked a round-trip ticket in business class for himself and a one-way in coach for Kevin.
Then he fooled Jenny and her halfway senile father into thinking he was going off on a jaunt to London to work on a potential client.
‘I’ll be back in a few days,’ he said. ‘You can take care of the gallery in the meantime.’
‘But—’ said Jenny.
‘Great. Kisses.’
There was no way of knowing which country was Kevin’s. Victor selected their destination on other grounds: enough civilization so nothing bad would happen to him – ergo, Kenya, not Somalia. And enough wilderness so the boy could never find his bearings – ergo, not a national park within walking distance of the nearest bus stop. In rough terms, this meant 550 kilometres from Nairobi and straight out into the middle of nowhere.
So far the trip had not been what Kevin had hoped – for instance, that he might discover a heart of gold somewhere inside Victor’s tough exterior. They’d had the misfortune to end up in separate sections during the flights, which meant none of what the eighteen-year-old had dreamed of: chatting about life and the future. Getting to know one another. Learning to like each other.
A rental car awaited them at the airport; Victor invited the boy to sit in the front seat. Like an equal. Now, maybe?
The boy wanted the trip to be a long one; after all, they were seated side by side.
‘Where are we going, Dad?’ he asked.
‘I told you not to call me Dad.’
And with that, the conversation was over.
The boss continued to say nothing as he used the GPS to aim the Range Rover. Westward ho.
The boy was equally silent, for three hours. What was there to say? But in the end, he got tired of it.
‘Can’t you tell me where we’re going? I’m curious.’
‘What’s with all the chit-chat? Just enjoy the view, dammit.’
A104 became B3 which became C12. The roads decreased both in width and quality. Asphalt turned to gravel as the sun went down. Victor and the boy had been on the vast savanna for some time now. And the shift from dusk to dark is fast, at the equator. Just as it turned pitch-black outside, Victor stopped the car.
‘We’re here.’
‘Where’s here?’
‘Where you belong. Get out of the car.’
Kevin did, in contrast to Victor, who remained behind the wheel with the engine running. He left the boy next to an acacia tree and drove on a bit, to a spot where he could turn around. On the way back, he rolled down his window to say farewell.
‘Don’t be upset. I’m sure you’ll be fine out here. I think it’s in your blood.’
‘But Dad …’ said Kevin.
‘I’ll be goddamned,’ Victor said, and drove off.
The kid had been repatriated. Nature would take care of the rest. Who could blame Victor if it took its course?
Just over twenty-four hours later, he was back in the gallery. One travel experience richer. One problem poorer.
‘How was London?’ Jenny wondered.
‘Hot,’ said Victor.
It was the twenty-fifth of February.
The Tax Agency refused to declare Kevin dead. Following up with the police report regarding his disappearance, they demanded the completion of Form 7695, ‘application to have a missing person declared deceased’. After that they would take the matter under consideration for a five-year period. Five years! Surely it hadn’t taken the lions more than five minutes.
At least everything else was going Victor’s way. The eternally grieving old man one floor up had, after all, turned over the entire establishment to him and his daughter, and Jenny said yes when he first took a deep breath and thereupon proposed. The breath was on account of his aversion, not out of apprehension for what she might say. She never contradicted.
Victor shared the happy matrimonial news with his father-in-law-to-be at the same time he told him he planned to take the daughter and father-in-law’s name instead of the other way around.
‘Out of respect for all you’ve done for me,’ he said, in accordance with the truth.
His father-in-law began to cry. To think that it all could have turned out so well for his beloved daughter.
The whole kit and caboodle was about to become Victor’s. All that was left to do was get it in writing.
It was a difficult time, those few years it took for the old man to die on his own. He regularly returned, over cognac, to the topic of whether there might be a grandchild on the way. Victor skilfully dodged the question. To keep from falling into fleshly temptation he doubled his weekly visits to the high-end prostitutes. With condoms. He would not let any more bastards, real or made-up, get in his way.
Then it arrived, the best day of Victor’s life so far. To think that it was on Christmas Eve that the old man told them the news. Victor could not imagine a better Christmas present!
‘My dear Jenny, my dear Victor. I will soon be reunited with Hillevi.’
‘What are you saying, Dad?’ Jenny said, upset.
‘I am riddled with cancer, just like your mother.’
Hallelujah, hallelujah, sing eternal praises, Victor thought.
‘How awful,’ he said.
Now his path was free and clear. From nothing to everything in twenty years and eleven days.
Victor did wait until his father-in-law’s body was cold, but barely, before he did what was left to do. He started a new limited liability company (Victory or Death Properties Ltd), protected the company with a prenup, got Jenny to hand over the art gallery, the six-bedroom apartment, and all her assets to him – at which point he sold it to the company for one krona. The operation gave his wife the formal right to fifty öre – half of one krona – in the event of their divorce. The rest would go to him.
It all went smoothly. As always, Jenny signed whatever Victor put in front of her. On rare occasions she had a question, but nothing he couldn’t fend off. For instance, she wanted to know why they should have a prenuptial agreement tied to the new company. Victor said he didn’t want to trouble her with administrative matters now that they would have children and everything (he assumed she didn’t understand that children presupposed sex).
Sure, she could fight the arrangement in court later on, perhaps with some success. But only on a purely theoretical level. Victor knew that in practice, she didn’t have it in her. And anyway, there wasn’t much legal help to be had for fifty öre.
There was a lot to think about to make sure everything turned out right. After all his years in the antisocial world of art dealership, there was now one thing that was more urgent than any other. Victor sold twelve modernist works at a discount and tore up and threw out a thirteenth, an Erich Heckel with a price tag of 180,000 kronor. Or ‘Erich WRECK-el’, as Victor secretly called him. The work featured a half-naked woman with androgynously chiselled features and green lips. The androgynous figure was such a gross affront to both beauty and society’s rules and regulations that Victor didn’t even want to hand that crap off for free, out of concern for the greater good.
After his initial art purge, he secretly listed Jenny’s official residence as the apartment in Bollmora. He wasn’t sure it was necessary, but in the troublesome world of jurisprudence, it was best to deploy both belt and suspenders.
And then it was finally time to get divorced.
‘Salmon or chicken for dinner?’ Jenny wondered one day.
‘Chicken, please,’ said Victor. ‘And also I want a divorce.’
That landed about as he expected.
‘Chicken,’ said Jenny.
After all, her father was dead. What reason did she have to try to breathe vigour into a similarly lifeless relationship?
The divorce gained legal force in just a few weeks, because Jenny still kept signing everything. Victor figured this was because she was stupid. The truth was, she just wanted to be done with him. Get away from there.
She got what she wanted. And yet not. After a life-long slumber, she woke up one day in a studio apartment in Bollmora, with hardly anything to her name but fifty öre and the clothes on her back.
Now, it so happened that Jenny was not as apathetic as Victor had thought. Early on in life she had made the choice to spend her time with art first and people second, assuming there was any time left over. And Victor and her circumstances made sure there wasn’t.
It was true that she prioritized the care of her father first and the cellar archive thereafter. But she wasn’t alone down there, among binders and documents. She had friends like Franz Kafka and August Strindberg in a small bookcase, and she adorned the walls with cheap but life-size paper reproductions of works by Vincent van Gogh, Max Beckmann, Isaac Grünewald, Marc Chagall, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Irma Stern, and a few others besides.
In the company of these artists, she herself painted with oils. It went so badly that with every passing day it became clearer to her just what geniuses her friends were. Archivist Jenny painted, and when she was finished, art critic Jenny lamented the results. On the whole, an agreeable existence. There, in the windowless cellar, she was content in her own misery. In this state she felt a kinship with her friend Kafka, who in turn felt that he had nothing in common even with himself.
On occasion she felt astonished that she could do so well with so little; she surfed around the internet to find answers and perhaps commonalities between her own life and those of the geniuses. She couldn’t quite say she was mentally ill like Munch (who depicted his own anguish), Goya (who had hallucinations), or Chalepas (who first made a sculpture and then destroyed what he had just created), but she couldn’t rule out a ‘neuropsychiatric disorder’. That would have to do.
This very debatable disorder of whatever-it-was didn’t stop her from detecting that the manager had begun to court her. And that her beloved father encouraged the arrangement. Victor was considerably older and didn’t seem to understand a bit of the modernist world that meant everything to her. But he was her father’s choice and he secured the future of their art gallery. Her father never went so far as to believe that she herself could do so. Until recently, she had only been a girl. Now she wasn’t much more than a young woman.
And anyway, what was love? Aside from love for the eternally vivid yet sadly deceased modernists.
She said yes when he proposed. Or maybe her father did. She nodded silently in affirmation.
Before a civil servant at city hall, though, she had to say what she said for her father’s sake. Because she couldn’t muster any warmth for her new spouse, she felt anything but excited about the marital duties that awaited. It was strange that nothing came of that, but it was just fine with her. If there was anyone she would happily undress in front of it was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. She would have loved to be Marzella in the painting at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Or one of the five nude bathing women at the Brücke Museum in Berlin.
Kirchner was unrequited love personified. Born in 1880. Took his own life in 1938 in despair over what Adolf was about to accomplish.
Hindsight is 20/20. Her new husband asked her to sign – so she signed. He was always talking so much, and so awfully, and if she just did as he said she could go back down to her friends in the cellar, safe in the knowledge that her father was satisfied. As long as he was alive.
Hindsight indeed. About the part where they never had sex. Twenty-three-year-old Jenny still hadn’t put any such knowledge into practice. She had had enough schooling and enough HBO to understand what it involved, though. Salvador Dalí’s masterpiece The Great Masturbator made her empathize with the Spaniard. It was said that Dalí had been thinking of himself as he painted it.
She took the fact that Victor never forced himself on her for shyness and uncertainty behind all that bravado. After all, he knew almost nothing about art. Especially modernism. Never was he so small in her eyes than when he spouted his constant ‘good old Matisse’ in front of clients. She had once shown him a picture of Harmony in Red in a book. ‘What’s that piece of crap?’ he’d said. ‘Don’t tell me it’s something you purchased?!’
Good old Matisse?
Now, however, she understood perfectly.
He was no innocent example of mediocrity. He had plans. They didn’t involve her and never had, except for as a means to an end.
Bloody hell. No more real home, no art gallery, no cellar full of friends, no life.
Might as well walk into the sea.
She didn’t know her way around the southern suburbs of Stockholm, had never been there before, but the capital city was surrounded by water. Surely all she had to do was walk; any direction would do. How long could it take? Fifteen minutes?
She walked slowly, feeling no urgency to reach her own death. She even spent time looking around. Why, it was getting on towards winter. The sun was shining and lots of folks were out pushing strollers. It must have been a weekend. Sunday, perhaps?
Way off in the distance was a shimmer of what looked like water. She headed in that direction, passing a field of kids playing football. They seemed to be having fun in the below-freezing weather. The first snow hadn’t yet fallen.
Suddenly the ball came bouncing her way. She reflexively grabbed it in both hands.
‘Nice catch!’ said one of the football boys.
She smiled in return and tossed the ball back to him; he thanked her and threw it back into the game. And that was the end of that.
Nice catch? Why had he said that? Because it was a nice catch. By definition, a person who could catch a ball in the air was not incompetent. That was all it took to set Jenny’s mind on a fresh path.
The only thing that would happen, if she drowned herself, was that she would have done Victor Alderheim a favour. Now that she thought about it, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. How the hell could he sell off the finest pieces the gallery owned for next to nothing? And where had that Erich Heckel painting gone?
Victor was pleased with the circumstances. The witch had been dead a long time. The old man had followed her. The make-believe marriage had been dissolved and the worst specimens of artwork disposed of. The work of building a collection of real art could begin.
And it would soon be five years since the bastard got eaten up by lions. The Tax Agency had promised to deliver the declaration of death by post.
Kevin spent the first minute after Victor left him alone on the Kenyan savanna standing still in the dark, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
During the second minute, he still didn’t understand but was starting to grasp a different fact: if he stayed put, he would soon be dead. During the last leg of the car ride he had seen with his own eyes that there were wild animals everywhere. Not least lions.
But that didn’t mean he had anywhere to go. Perhaps he could climb? If things were so bad that his boss and guardian wanted Kevin dead without making it happen himself, perhaps he shouldn’t have dropped him off right next to a tree?
It’s not always easy to climb an acacia, but Kevin was both young and limber. Soon he was sitting in the branches almost three metres above the ground. There he planned to sit until dawn. It was imperative that he stay awake.
Anyone who has ever spent a night alone in an acacia on the Kenyan savanna knows that it’s easy to become discouraged. It took Kevin no more than twenty minutes to question his own rules. Why must he stay awake? After night came day, and he’d still be in Kenya. Just a few months earlier, his science teacher in Bollmora had been kind enough to teach the class about the wild animals of East Africa. The very hungriest of them hunted at night, while the angriest slept. At daybreak, they switched off.
If Kevin climbed down when the sun came up, what would he encounter? A buffalo? A rhinoceros? A female elephant who was dead sure he was a threat to her baby?
And if none of those happened to be around for the moment: which direction should he go?
No, he might as well just fall asleep to escape it all. But first he had to try to figure out how he had ended up here.
A few years earlier, his mother had introduced him to a man who was, shortly thereafter, appointed as Kevin’s guardian. This man wanted to be called ‘boss’. The boy accepted this arrangement; he’d never had a dad, after all. The boss might be the closest he’d ever get to one.
In retrospect, Kevin thought he understood. Mum had probably been way up in the hierarchy of prostitutes when he was little but fell down the ranks as she grew older. When she died, freed of her immune system and all its whims, only Kevin and the guardian were left. Mum had been the very embodiment of love and generosity in the midst of everything, which was more than you could say about the boss.
So why had he accepted this assignment? Kevin guessed money was involved. Mum must have paid him so her son would have security even when she could no longer be there for him. This plan didn’t turn out so great, there was no denying that. She probably hadn’t had very many stand-in mums or dads from which to choose. So Victor it was. He was an art dealer.
Then came Kevin’s eighteenth birthday. The boss was formally relieved of his job. But instead of ceasing the pizza deliveries and asking the boy to take care of himself, he had brought him to Kenya.
Why?
Apparently so he would die. But why?
Did his contract with Mum state that he would support Kevin all the way through university? Or was the boss up to something illegal, something he was afraid Kevin would discover? In which case, how? They never spent any time together.
The whole situation was impossible to understand. Much like life in general.
Did he hear something rustling out there in the dark? Kevin listened intently.
No, it was probably nothing.
Anyway, life. Which was about to come to an end. At least his early years had been pretty happy ones. Mum was around during the daytime, or starting around lunch, at any rate, when she woke up after a long night of work. She bought him things. He was the first in his friend group to have his own tablet. On his fourteenth birthday he received a laptop. That was right around the time Kevin began to understand his mother’s career, and what all her vitamin shots really were.
He loved her no less for it. But it did make a mess of his social life. Kevin knew he got along well with others. He joined them in kicking a ball around the playground, and that was fun. So was school itself. He liked group work the best; it was all give and take and included the occasional laugh. It made him feel normal.
But then the school day ended. Kevin learned the hard way not to go home with any of his friends. There he was subjected to their parents. Who is your father? What does your mother do? Lying was the only option to stay ahead of the game. He tried that, but it didn’t make him feel good.
While he lived with his mother, of course, he could have brought a friend over to his place. But to answer his friend’s questions, he would have had to say something along the lines of ‘Dad doesn’t exist, Mum is asleep because she has to work tonight, as a prostitute. Also she has a bit of a cough. We suspect HIV. Would you like a sandwich?’
Perhaps it was the laptop that spared him from becoming a complete outcast. Online he could play games with people his own age all over the world. Just how ‘his own age’ they really were was impossible to say; everyone had a different name than in real life, and made up both age and sex. That was fine with Kevin. He wanted to be called Lonelyplanet, a rather solitary and poetic handle he’d gotten from a travel guide to France that Mum had given him along with the promise that one day they would visit there.
Instead he ended up in Bollmora. And had to choose the name Lonelyplanet47. Apparently there were forty-six other lonely planets out there.
There he sat, with a guardian who wanted to be called ‘boss’ but not ‘Dad’, and who came to visit once a week at the most, to fill the cupboards and be extra sure not to accidentally utter any words of encouragement. All this, immediately after the one who actually had love to give gave him away so she herself could die.
But Kevin managed, satisfied with what little he had. He still enjoyed school. His classmates left him alone on afternoons and evenings. His weekends consisted of the laptop, pizza boxes, and … well, that was it. It would be nice to become an adult. His grades would get him all the way to university when the time came. Or maybe he would get a job. In France, even? What kinds of things did Frenchmen do? Picked grapes, probably. Maybe not all of them.
Then there was this issue with the lack of parents. Kevin didn’t want a new mother to replace the one who’d done such a good job, given the circumstances. But there ought to be a father out there somewhere, if his biology teacher was to be believed. For the time being, this father had a peculiar proxy in the form of art dealer Victor Alderheim.
It would be an exaggeration to claim there was any chemistry between Kevin and Victor. When the latter arrived with the weekly pizza delivery, conversation consisted of a ‘hi’, an ‘everything okay?’, a ‘here’s the food’, and, on rare occasions, a ‘Jesus, what a downpour’. Followed by a ‘see you next week, later.’
Kevin wanted so badly to prolong those moments. He made his way to the school library, where he found a hefty book that claimed to give an overview of all of art history in its more than four hundred pages, starting with the cave paintings of the Stone Age. His plan was to browse through it to find topics of discussion for the next week.
This book fascinated the seventeen-year-old; it was chockablock with full-colour illustrations. A world he’d had no idea existed opened before him. He found that he had firm opinions about most of it.
He gave the Renaissance an immediate thumbs-down. It all seemed like one big advertisement for the Bible. The Romantic Movement had more interesting traits. Eugène Delacroix even depicted two bare female breasts when he illustrated the July Revolution of 1830.
But things didn’t get truly exciting until the nineteenth century was about to give way to the twentieth. Kevin was utterly taken by Claude Monet and his dawn painting with a red sun and a rowboat holding a helmsman and a single passenger. For a long time the boy thought his fascination was rooted in wondering who the passenger might be. Something told him it was a woman, but it was impossible to tell. Where was she going? And who was at the helm? A poor fisherman, up with the sun to earn a bit of money? To safely transport the woman to … well, where was she going? And why? So early in the day.
Then he realized that the painting had grabbed hold of him for a different reason. It was the dawn light itself that was the true art. The way the red sun was mirrored in the water. The mild fog that suggested early autumn and … Kevin found himself speculating about how warm the air might be. Or, rather, how cold. Eleven degrees?
Victor had hardly made it through the door with the week’s pizzas before Kevin eagerly showed him the page with the painting that had moved him so.
‘Look, boss. Isn’t this beautiful?’
Victor cast a glance at the open book. And was annoyed.
‘Watch out for that rubbish.’
This was the very kind of art that led to homosexuality. That questioned authority. That muddied societal ideals.
‘Jesus, what a downpour, right? See you next week. Later.’
Then came his eighteenth birthday. Victor dropped by, and for the first time, his arms weren’t full of food. He thought he and the boy should discover the world together. For the hundredth, and last, time, hope for something that at least resembled a father-son relationship was kindled in Kevin.
There was no calling it anything other than attempted murder. Victor wanted the lions to do the job. And very soon, they would.
Must. Not. Fall asleep.
Might as well fall asleep.
That’s when he spotted them. Two lionesses under the tree; they’d already discovered him. Dead-tired Kevin was suddenly wide awake. His will to live was greater than his will not to. And after all, being eaten up by carnivores could not be the most comfortable way to meet one’s end.
In general, lions are not great thinkers. They live more on instinct. Like the one that told them the smell from the creature up in the tree equalled food for half the family. Not great thinkers, and essentially useless climbers. Unlike the leopard, who was waiting his turn nearby, until he had waited so long he forgot what he was waiting for and wandered off.
The creature in the tree didn’t give up. When the morning sun appeared, the lionesses slunk off, in a bad mood after their fruitless night. Time to locate the pride and lie down in the shadows somewhere to sleep off their hunger and the hot day. Neither of the lionesses realized that if one of them stayed put while the other gathered cubs and male, their daytime rest could be spent right under the acacia which contained the yummy-smelling creature, until their food fell down right under their noses. Table service!
Kevin, who was not supposed to fall asleep under any circumstances, did so anyway as soon as the lions vanished and all the adrenaline he’d been feeling did the same. He lost his grip and hit the soft slope beneath the tree with a dull thud.
Medicine man Ole Mbatian the Younger liked to converse. To exchange ideas with others. Learn new things. Unfortunately, life in the Maasai village was not optimal for his needs. From his wives he learned only to be ashamed of himself. The weekly meetings with Chief Toothless were anything but intellectually stimulating, and neither were his conversations with the villagers in general. There were many positive things to be said about the typical cow- or goat-herder on the savanna, but anyone seeking deeper insights to the meaning of life would do well to speak with someone else.
Which left the smith’s sister. In her youth she had accidentally boarded the wrong bus in Narok and ended up in Nairobi by mistake. It took her three years to find her way home again. The advantage to that was that she knew better than anyone else in the village how life worked on the outside. The disadvantage was that she could never shut up about it. Ole Mbatian was envious, but since he wouldn’t admit it to himself, his feelings stopped with believing that he couldn’t stand her chatter.
His dawn walks on the savanna brought a suitable escape. There the medicine man could talk to himself while, for instance, he searched for amaryllis to treat snakebites. To keep these conversations as interesting as possible, he switched between Swahili (which he got from his mother), the Maasai language Maa (from his father), and English (which the colonizers had long ago bestowed upon his people along with Christianity and left-hand traffic).
Amaryllis grew everywhere except where Ole happened to be looking on this particular day. But it was a beautiful morning and the birds were welcoming it at full volume. There was something religious about the whole experience. Ole Mbatian had great faith in God. Thanks to his faith, he wasn’t frightened, only happy, when a nearly full-grown man fell from the heavens and landed at his feet.
‘Thank you, Lord,’ he said, picking up the black-and-blue boy.
Kevin was half out of it with exhaustion and dreamed that someone was gently lifting him up. Or was that for real? A person? Who was saying something Kevin didn’t understand.
‘What did you say?’ he managed to produce, in English, despite his daze.
‘Oh, so you don’t speak all our languages yet,’ said Ole Mbatian. ‘Well, the ways of the Lord are unfathomable. You’re just as welcome anyway, my dear, beloved boy.’
The medicine man, who had been starting to think that he was getting too old for just about everything, gently arranged the boy on his back and set off briskly home to his village. It was only seven kilometres.
Kevin was suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, but now he had been admitted to the medicine man’s clinic. Ole Mbatian dabbed his forehead with cool banana leaves and managed to get some water with a mild dose of cayenne pepper and ginger into him.
Then he thanked the Lord once more, and said to the boy:
‘What shall we call you, my son?’
‘Kevin?’ Kevin suggested.
Ole Mbatian smiled. Kevin sounded lovely. Kevin it was.
Three years and eleven months later, Kevin was no longer a boy but a full-grown man of almost twenty-two years. He had developed talents he’d never even imagined. He had an ear for languages, and now he spoke fluent English and could get along in both Swahili and Maa. And ball sense! His father the medicine man had put him in warrior training early on, under the tutelage of both himself and his brother. For God had seen fit to send him a son who knew absolutely nothing about spears, clubs and knives, one who wouldn’t last a day out on the savanna.
Ole and his brother taught; Kevin nodded, understood, practised, and absorbed. By the time he was nineteen, the heaven-sent boy was nearly fully versed in how to survive under the open skies, hungry gobs of wild animals notwithstanding. Around the same time, he felled his first lion with a spear (out of sheer necessity); as a twenty-one-year-old he swam the Mara River and back after having first spotted nine crocodiles with his bare eye and noting their exact positions and whether they were looking for food or just lying there taking it easy.
Kevin loved his new life. The first real life he’d had. And no one could be prouder of his son than Ole Mbatian the Younger. He had no doubts in the face of the crucial year-long test Kevin must undergo before he could be sworn in as a full Maasai warrior. The youngster was six or seven years older than the other candidates, but his journey from the heavens had, of course, begun so much later.
However, no one told the boy what awaited them after he and five others spent twelve full moons in a row on the savanna and in the bush, with nothing but the clothes on their back and their spears, clubs and knives. On the day after the twelfth full moon, they were all in one piece and back in the village where a feast was being prepared.
In the first hours after the completed ceremony, it dawned on Kevin what remained.
Circumcision!
Better the long rains, the short rains, and another twelve full moons on the savanna than that.
Papa Ole, the most understanding person you could imagine, couldn’t see the problem. He explained to his son that you were born, learned the art of war, got circumcised, got married, and regretted the marriage. That was just the way it was. And there was no need for Kevin to fear that by way of the circumcision he would be tying himself to En-Kai or any other god he didn’t feel he knew well enough. The medicine man had heard that there were tribes to both the north and the west that made such a connection. In the Maasai view, circumcision was a test of manhood, full stop. All the son needed to worry about was not making a sound during the process. Ole was sure he could manage.
And he believed that was the end of the discussion.
But Kevin withdrew from the festivities. He sat down in his father the medicine man’s hut to think. Naturally he could handle the ceremony; it wasn’t that. But what business did anyone else have with his willy? How exactly did it work? Did they take half off, or just a little bit? And what did they do with the leftovers? Toss it to the chickens?
Kevin didn’t want to know more, but he didn’t have much time. Papa didn’t understand and never would, no matter how hard his son tried to explain. The medicine man himself was the one who held the knife.
Suddenly everything happened very fast. The young man took his Swedish passport and changed into the clothes he hadn’t used for five years, but which still fit, if badly. Then he stuffed his shúkà into his backpack, grabbed two of his father’s valuables to use as payment on his journey – and took off. He fled in the name of his own willy. Without saying farewell.
From the day the medicine man plucked Kevin from the ground beneath the acacia tree, Kevin had enjoyed five years of love from his adoptive father and everyone else around him. The son received constant praise for being a quick study from his father’s brother, Uhuru Mbatian, the prominent Maasai warrior and Kevin’s private tutor in the art of surviving on the savanna. Of course, it was about much more than that; it was about respect for animals and nature. And about patience. Integrity. The art of using all your senses.
The Maasai education started when a child was four, with exams beginning later in the teen years. Kevin began when most of his age set were already finished. But he caught up in less than half a decade.
Except for the circumcision part.
Sticking to one’s principles was another thing Uhuru Mbatian had taught his nephew. The student was practising this to its fullest when he decided to flee. The second most important thing in Kevin’s life was his adoptive father Ole. The most important was his willy. Not that he had used it for anything besides passing water yet, but that might change one day. God willing.
He had to go back to Sweden; where else could he go?
It took a few days, but now Kevin was standing outside the door of his apartment in Bollmora. Should he unlock it and step in, or ring the bell first? What if someone answered!? Who would it be? Certainly not Victor.
The nameplate said ‘Alderheim’. It seemed reasonable to assume that the studio was empty, meaning it would be a place he could rest up after his long journey and ponder his next step in life.
He unlocked the door and opened it – and found himself facing a stranger.
‘Who are you?’ said Jenny Alderheim.
‘I could ask you the same thing,’ said Kevin.
‘I live here,’ said Jenny.
‘Me too. I think.’
Kevin looked both kind and surprised, and he had his own key, which was enough for Jenny to ask him to come inside instead of calling the police. Anyway, she had no phone from which to call.
They each took a seat on a wooden chair in the eighteen-square-metre apartment and told one another about themselves and their relationship to the man who had done them so wrong. When Jenny got on the topic of her former life and how she had been happiest in a cellar, where she preferred to talk to various works of art on the wall, she heard how silly it sounded. Kevin consoled her by saying that he had once spoken to two people in a rowboat at the entrance to the harbour in Le Havre.
‘Monet,’ said Jenny.
Her new acquaintance had just described the prime example of impressionism. With reverence, it seemed.
Kevin nodded. And told her about the book he’d borrowed from the library in the hopes of sparking a conversation with the great art dealer. And how poorly it went. But the silver lining was that he had become friends with Claude Monet. And BFFs with Marc Chagall.
Jenny was bowled over. Not because Chagall was one of her absolute favourites, but because she was sitting here talking about art with an actual human, one who wasn’t even dead or an artist himself or both. One who responded. Then she heard herself say:
‘What would you say if I said “Harmony in Red”?’
Kevin smiled.
‘Good old Matisse.’
Jenny was in love.
Before Jenny and Kevin had even known each other for one hour, they had managed to share the short version of each of their life stories and discuss the impact Matisse’s mother had had on his artistic development.
But it was starting to get dark outside. Reality was crowding in. Jenny had been living in the apartment for almost three months. Kevin had lived there for several years, several years earlier. Neither of them wanted to claim right of occupancy ahead of the other. They would simply have to share.
In his eternal kindness, Victor had supplied Jenny with a few thousand kronor when he ditched her in the apartment. He said she was welcome to come by if she needed a few thousand extra to really get back on her feet. He made no promises, times were tough, but he would try. For the time being he would cover the rent and the high-speed internet. These were not free, he wanted Jenny to know.
There were a few hundred-kronor notes left of Alderheim’s alms; Jenny lived on the cheap. The pot would soon need replenishing. What could Kevin contribute?
It looked promising for a moment, as he placed a couple of wrinkled but colourful notes on the table. Four hundred Kenyan shillings. About thirty-six kronor. Minus forty in exchange fees.
When Kevin asked directly, Jenny stated that she would rather drink poison than track down Victor Alderheim and stand there with cap in hand. What that man did not need was to be made to feel generous. He ought to be tormented, as he tormented others. And then he should be tormented a little extra, just for being the person he was.
Her voice was quiet but firm. Hearing it, Kevin felt an affinity for Jenny, for he carried similar feelings. He wasn’t exactly proud of it, but he’d had plenty of time to think during his years in Kenya. One image that recurred in his mind was dropping his former guardian off on the savanna in front of a pride of lions. ‘Why, what are you doing, my son?’ said Victor in Kevin’s fantasy. ‘Don’t call me that,’ Kevin responded as he drove off.
Did Jenny and Kevin have this in common as well? The thought of revenge?
‘What would the Maasai have done with him?’ Jenny asked.
The art dealer had swindled and ruined his wife. And tried to take the life of a young man he’d likely been paid to protect. No sense in arguing over which was worse; in fact, in Maasai society, it would have led to the harshest punishment from the village council: his head stuck in an anthill for a slow death.
Jenny didn’t think they needed to go quite that far. Anyway, there weren’t any anthills in the immediate vicinity of the art gallery.
Victor Alderheim would get what was coming to him – Jenny and Kevin shook on it. Kevin thought, but didn’t say, that Jenny’s hand was soft, warm, and pleasant. And Jenny didn’t say that she thought the same thing but the other way around.
‘Come on,’ she said, pulling her new cohabitant to his feet.
There was a second-hand shop not far away, one that sold just about everything. Kevin needed something warmer to wear on his top half and the household needed an extra mattress to put on the floor.
Bollmora’s second-hand shopkeeper recognized Jenny and offered a friendly greeting. She had been there a number of times before. She wasn’t one of his best customers; she was far too cautious about price tags for the shopkeeper’s taste. But he knew she was hard up. For fifteen kronor he had sold her a table lamp he could have easily gotten twenty-five for. And when she’d gazed at a scrub-brush for long enough, he threw it in for free.
Now, in any case, he got to sell a mattress and a Norwegian wool sweater. Two hundred kronor into the accounts, no receipt.
‘Come back anytime.’
Just before a blood-pudding dinner, Kevin sat down to compose a long letter to Ole Mbatian in which he explained himself, asked for forgiveness, and proclaimed his gratefulness and love for the man who had first saved his life and then given him a new one. Unfortunately, he could never, ever return. Uncle Uhuru had, in his sunrise-to-sunset lessons, preached that a true Maasai warrior armed himself with his club, spear, knife, and principles. Without all four, you were not complete. Kevin had had to leave his club, spear and knife behind, but he still had his firm principles. The highest of which was that he would allow no one to cut into his genitals. So that was that. Kevin apologized again and closed his letter.
Jenny read it and said she thought Kevin was brave. When it came to the principle in question, she supported it. Especially since the reasoning wasn’t religious in nature. It was another matter that art history was full of circumcisions, a symbol of Abraham’s covenant with God. According to the Scriptures, the latter wanted a minor portion of the willies of Abraham’s descendants (which turned out to be quite numerous); in return, Abraham would be given the land of Canaan and become the ancestor of nearly everyone and everything. An honourable agreement, Abraham thought, and with that it was done. This had, as far as Jenny was aware, nothing to do with the rite of manhood that Kevin had fled from, and even less to do with female circumcision, which ought to be labelled aggravated assault.
And so it was that the newfound friends, also virgins both, came to discuss during their simple dinner the value in keeping one’s own genitals intact. Both were additionally conscious that the person across the table had soft, warm and pleasant hands.
Jenny enjoyed having Kevin as a sudden cohabitant from the very start. For years she had been certain that she wasn’t like other people, and that she therefore must be content with the small things in life. Now she lived with a person her own age who wasn’t like other people either; the two of them were more like each other. Even as their collected financial assets shrank, their sense of solidarity and the need to take revenge upon a common enemy grew.
No killing. Only tormenting. A Swedish version; head-in-an-anthill-lite. But they needed to be able to afford food on the table to have enough strength to give Victor the punishment he deserved, or even to figure out what that might look like. Even if they stuck to blood pudding breakfast and dinner, with no fried eggs, jam, or lunch in between, their money would run out in a few days.
This conflict meant that their irritation about Victor only increased. Jenny taught Kevin her mantra:
‘Fucking Victor.’
As therapy, it was effective. For any other purpose, it was not.
Income first. Revenge second. The order of operations was set.
‘What can you do, that could earn us money?’ Kevin asked.
Jenny considered this.
‘I’m good at archiving.’
‘Archiving what?’
‘Whatever you want.’
Kevin didn’t know what the market looked like in Stockholm for archivists of whatever. Nor did Jenny.
‘How about you?’
‘I can’t do anything. Except stare down a lion. Do whatever I like with a throwing club. Swim across a river full of crocodiles without being eaten. Hit my target every time with a spear or bow and arrow. Speak Swahili and Maa. And a few other things.’
‘Do whatever you like with a throwing club – what might one want to do with one of those?’
‘Hit a buffalo in the head from sixty metres away. Or at least fifty. Papa Ole could do seventy, but he’s extraordinary.’
Kevin’s résumé was longer than Jenny’s, but none of his talents were Stockholm-suitable. For instance, there were no crocodiles in Nybroviken, and all of the city’s buffalo were safely behind fences at Skansen.
‘I can survive on the savanna for a year as well, with nothing but a knife, club, and spear.’
‘So you ought to be able to keep the two of us alive at least through this week?’
Sure, but there was just this issue with a lack of wild animals. One prerequisite for successfully taking down an antelope, butchering it, and grilling it on a campfire was, of course, that there be at least one antelope at hand.
‘Maybe we should reconsider Skansen, then,’ Jenny said.
Skansen was Stockholm’s noble open-air museum with its zoo full of bears, moose, wolves, lynx and other creatures that wouldn’t feel at home in East Africa.
‘And enjoy free food in prison afterwards,’ said Kevin.
They smiled at their miserable circumstances. At least they still enjoyed each other’s company.
It occurred to Kevin that both he and Jenny were by definition unemployed. If he knew his Sweden, that meant unemployment benefits.
In principle, it was a lovely idea: getting paid for not working, while they worked full-time on getting revenge on Victor Alderheim.
Jenny knew it wasn’t that simple. For instance, in order to be considered job-seekers they must actively look for jobs. Anyone who didn’t was classified as lazy and that wouldn’t get them any money at all.
How this worked in greater detail was something the employment agency would have to figure out. They had an office in downtown Stockholm.
But there was no point in hurrying off. If they were sloppy with the details, there was a risk that one of them would actually be offered a job. That would mean more money in hand, but not much time left over for what was truly important.
Kevin knew what he had to do. All of his belongings were in the backpack he’d had with him five years earlier, when Victor tried to get him killed. They included his passport and a few other things, most importantly: his shúkà.
The Swedish Maasai’s entrance into the employment agency was a grand one. Kevin had practically frozen to death on the way, but now he stood there in his proud, red-and-black checked cloth, sandals on his feet. The counsellor at the agency had nothing against dealing with Kevin and Jenny as a unit. This initial meeting would be all about registering them as job-seekers and communicating the general guidelines. In the future they might talk about job-hunting classes or professional development training. Out of sheer curiosity, the counsellor elected to begin with the man in the red-and-black checked cloth. So, he was looking for work as a Maasai warrior? Even without taking a closer look at the placement files, they could probably assume that the demand for those was limited. Perhaps he would consider something else? Taxi driver, for instance?
Kevin had learned to drive a car on the savanna. In the village there was nothing but a moped here or there, but a Range Rover criss-crossed the valley; it belonged to the World Wildlife Fund. They were there to save the leopard from extinction. That particular effort wasn’t going great, but Kevin had become friends with one of the WWFers, a Norwegian woman who was extremely surprised when one of the young Maasai began to speak Swedish with her. This contact led to Kevin tracking down leopard families for the Norwegian in return for driving lessons.
‘Shall I interpret what you just told me to mean that you don’t have a driver’s licence?’ said the counsellor.
‘Do you need one to drive a taxi?’
The effect was as intended. The counsellor turned to Jenny. Who made the mistake of saying she had worked in an art gallery all her life and was a real hotshot when it came to archives. The culturally well-rounded counsellor happened to know off the top of his head that Nationalmuseum had just put out a job announcement that might be a good fit.
Although their goal was to not get a job, Jenny’s face lit up. Nationalmuseum wasn’t her favourite; they administered, among other things, the world’s oldest portrait gallery, almost five thousand paintings whose common attribute was that they prettified the subject’s outward appearance and ignored what was on the inside. Altogether, almost five hundred years of faces that said nothing.
But, of course, Nationalmuseum was more than that. Not as much modernism as Jenny would have liked; but that was not part of the museum’s mission.
Just as Jenny was starting to get really excited, the counsellor brought out the job notice. The museum had a list of requirements not even Victor Alderheim could lie his way to: certified proficiency in both English and French; three years’ academic study in archival and informational science.
‘Who spends three years at university to learn how to archive?’ Kevin wondered.
Jenny was back in reality. They were there to get money, not jobs. She asked the counsellor how much they were talking, and whether it might be possible to get a small amount in advance.
The response was not at all what Jenny and Kevin would have liked. For one thing, that money didn’t come from the employment office but whichever unemployment fund one was affiliated with. There were funds for the unaffiliated as well, but to access these took forms, statements from former employers, and a few other things besides. As far as the employment counsellor understood, you also had to start by paying an application fee of 130 kronor for the unemployment fund to even take on your case.
‘Per person?’
‘Um, yes. Per month.’
Jenny and Kevin realized that they would be financially ruined several times over before they could even claim any money. Paying in order to get paid? What had happened to the Swedish social safety net?
The counsellor suspected that these clients were out for money rather than work; he’d run across their type before.
‘Perhaps you should set your sights on income support instead. Or social welfare, as we typically call it. The annoying thing is that you won’t get a single krona along that avenue either, if you aren’t at the disposal of the job market.’
The new friends stopped off for a far-too-expensive consolation coffee in the city while they turned over a few more rocks.
If it wouldn’t be possible to get paid for nothing, perhaps they should aim for employment for one of them while the other focused on Alderheim. Was archiving really the only thing Jenny could do, if she placed her humbleness aside? Couldn’t she rightfully call herself an art expert?
Yes, if she put her mind to it. But that wasn’t a get-rich-quick sort of avenue. Even being an artist was bad enough. Vincent van Gogh managed to slap together two thousand paintings in his day, and even so he was destitute by the time he shot himself.
Kevin thought there might be a connection there but had to let it go because Jenny passed the question back to him. Same humbleness aside: What could Kevin do better than anyone else, that could also be leveraged into money?
Well, there was that issue with the swimming among crocodiles and the lack of crocodiles in Greater Stockholm. Not to mention the ice on the water.
All he could come up with was that they could have brought home some bacon from the local amusement park, Gröna Lund, if it had been open in the middle of winter. There you could win stuffed animals simply by hitting a target, and that was within Kevin’s skill set, presumably no matter the projectile. He expected he could amass ten or twenty teddies before they were kicked out.
‘To sell to whom?’ Jenny wondered.
Kevin didn’t know. In any event, it was off the table.
Ninety-six kronor for two cups of coffee and one shared bun wasn’t really a treat they could afford, but they were screwed anyway. Whether they began to starve in three days or two didn’t really matter.
They sat at the table in silence as Kevin drained the last of his coffee.
‘Fucking Victor,’ he said, digging his civvies out of his backpack.
The coffee was gone; time to change clothes in the café bathroom. If only he had the oomph to get up.
Jenny was gazing distractedly out the café window.
‘Sweet, sweet revenge,’ she said.
Kevin noted that this might be something to put on their wish list. But was Jenny thinking of Victor Alderheim or the employment office in this case?
‘No. It says “Sweet Sweet Revenge” in the shop window over there. “Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd”.’
Kevin looked where Jenny was looking.
‘What kind of name is that? It makes it sound like they’re selling revenge in jars.’
‘That would be perfect,’ said Jenny. ‘Do you think four jars, two each, would be enough for Victor?’
If only life were that simple. But if perchance they were packaging and selling revenge across the street, one could only imagine that they must want payment.
‘In general, businesses don’t work for free,’ said Kevin. ‘How much revenge do you suppose we could get for two hundred kronor?’
‘Minus the hundred we just drank up,’ Jenny corrected him. ‘There’s no way to know in advance. Go get changed now, and we’ll head across the street.’