Assisted Living: A Novel (28 page)
Well I remember how Holger looked and sounded when I broke the news to him. He was even paler than usual and was weepy as an orgasm.
“My Nordic brain just can’t wrap itself around the fact that Wolrad could behave in such a despicable way toward an innocent child.”
“So it’s certain that you don’t know anything else about the matter?”
“Just as certain as the sun rises in the north.”
None of the men could be convinced of his guilt. But the sexual-offense wasn’t the only serious charge. For example, Holger was cited several times for the persecution of minorities. I sat down with him a couple of years later, when he came sauntering in on a charge that he’d been trying to instigate a pogrom.
I’m reading directly from the interrogation report:
“So, Holger ... perhaps you know why you’re here?” “You call, I come a-runnin’, massa.”
“Stop right there! Now, a pious little auntie called in and told us that you were bragging outside Bauta Gym in Kusmark about how you bathed in Jewblood during the war and how much you’d like to relive those good old evil days.”
“What?! You think I have anything against Jewdevils? Me, who’s always preached circumcision and bloody offerings! Besides, one of the best lovers I’ve ever had was a hooknosed, curlyhaired kosherslaughterer, whateverthefuck his name was.”
“You’re supposed to have said that they should be roasted in their own fat.”
“All I might’ve said about Jeeeews, is that they’re nice and greasy . . . Shit, I got my Weltanschauung from Lukåcs, Jiminy Cricket, and Marcuse!”
“Here’s the deal, Holger. If we get another report that you’re threatening the inferior races with beatings and gassings, we’ll have to set you straight in court, that’s just the way it is. Agda Meir isn’t the first we’ve heard from.” “Lots of people are envious that I’ve got the gift of gab, the eyes of a serpent, and the body of a mannequin.” “You’ve sworn to call down sorrow and damnation on everything from Samis to niggers, and a lot of it reminds me of that German character... you know... ummm ... what the hell’s his name ...”
“Heini Hemmi?”
“That’s the one … but what I wanted to say is that you have to hold your tongue about how the swarthyhost must be exterminated, and so forth, because this here is a Free Church district, and people have enough trouble just keeping their privates clean …”
Otherwise, Holger Holmlund was usually too drunk and horny to give a damn about politics and religion. As to drugs, we never could pin anything on him when it came to moonshine and dope. If I call to mind all the fruidess accusations against and investigations of Holmlund, it’s striking how skillful he was at squirming his way out of them—there were hardly ever any reliable witnesses and he usually had someone whod vouch for him. If nothing else, Henning Sjöström always backed him up. If we just take the second half of the sixties, we have: Sex with a minor … pettytheft … misappropriation of movi-estarphotos … misuse of difficult words … coitusinterruptus … exposing a slackcock … serving foreign spiritual powers … subversion … scootertheft … prankcalling … arson … genocide … needless neediness … badmouthing popularlyelectedofficials … elitism … enginetampering … murderfucking … unlawful giggling … scandalous braggadocio … blasphemy … bestiality … disturbing the peace of the grave … cannibalism … serious assault … incest … loquaciousness … failure to commit suicide … sex with the overaged … drunkenness … melancholy … lightheartedness … hermaphroditism … failure to move beyond the analstage … indigestion … hightreason … making rudegestures at the grievanceofficer … violentresistance … poorgrooming … instigation of Satantic sadism … possession of a forbidden analstimulator … massmurder …
That last one makes for a strange story. Holmlund and some southern queerbeard nailed together a house of worship in Gran, where they subsequently lured old and decrepit shrews by promising them spiritual guidance and Extreme Unction. In and of itself, that wasn’t illegal, but when a roving shiteater by the name of Assar Lalla happened by and saw Holger and the foreigner performing a shitfaced bloodeagle on a crookbacked oldcunt, he sprang over to the policestation and we drove off in a riotcontroltruck. It was a lovely September day, when nature’s at deaths door. Sirens blaring, we screeched to the turnaround. Holger and the other geezer came out on the bridge to see what was up.
“So, Holmlund,” said a respectable old inspector, who used raw porkshanks instead of diapers, “where’ve you stashed all the poor wretches you’ve offed?”
“But Hugglund!” Holger twittered and bravely struggled to wipe away his Polish grin, “surely you know me well enough to see how gaga I am about my fellow man? The women who came to my and Poglavnik’s chapel were saved, ask them yourself.”
“We’ll get to that, but now why don’t you be good boys and take your clothes off.”
They did that and the inspector paid their orifices a little visit. The queerbeard looked ancient, but he rasped out some perverse rubbish when the inspector started poking around in his outstretched asshole. He got a baton to the nose, which sent him to the ground.
“You aren’t thinking about beating up an oldgeezer who doesn’t even know if God exists or not?!” Holmlund objected.
A pimply subordinate kneed him in the crotch.
“Holger and Ante, I wanted to let you know that you’re suspected of torture and murder. So why don’t you hang around for a coffee and a chat,” the inspector rumbled.
“Whatthefuck,” the queerbeard jabbered.
“Alrighty,” Grampa said and put out his cigarette with his tongue.
We held them for three days and three nights, and we put clamps on their urethras so they couldn’t piss. They weren’t allowed to sleep and were forced to listen to Barry Manilow while they were in their cells. But the old cows in the rootcellars around the synagogue unanimously insis ed that Holger and Ante were virile and sweet, and that they could preach the shorthairs right off you. None of them had witnessed any violence. At the same time, Assar Lalla, the only witness, disappeared for good in the unexplored mangroveforests in the innermost part of the Bay of Bothnia. Since we hadn’t found any graves or bodyparts in Gran, the two reprobates got off. Not too many days passed before the satanicsynagogue burned down and a dozen invalids perished …
“Do you know anything about this, Holmlund?” the inspector asked over the telephone.
“Even less than I know about the femaleorgasm and the origin of the ovenuniverse!” he answered.
So the matter was dropped.
There were hundreds of accusations against him, but none of them ever got to court. If I pick up the list again at the start of the seventies, we have: molestation of elkhunters … premature ejaculation … excessive wit … implausibility … mimicry … shyness … vampirism … teratology … reevaluation of all values …
__________
rikscancer
—play on the title
Reichskanzler
metestrus
—period of sexual inactivity that follows estrus
gawd
—nutso galorum—totally wrong
prince of this world
—the devil
GB-Gubbe
—mascot in ads for the Swedish ice-cream company GB Glace: a pudgy clown with a sickeningly sweet smile tipping his hat to the world
kicksled
—a sled consisting of a chair mounted on flexible metal runners; the sled is driven by kicking the ground as you go
lefse
—thin, unleavened bread of Norwegian origin. Called klådda in Sweden
Steffan and Bengt
—characters on a Swedish television series
Fritz Haarmann
—“The Vampire of Hanover”; serial killer of adolescent boys in Germany during the years immediately following World War I
Vyshinsky
—Andrey: Prosecutor General of the USSR and considered to be the legal mastermind behind Stalin’s Great Purge. He was also a prosecutor during the Nuremberg trials
Freisler
—Roland: acted as judge, jury and executioner in Hitlers People’s Court (
Volksgerichtshof
). During his tenure, there was a dramatic rise in the number of death sentences handed out
falukorv
—traditional Swedish sausage
Bullerby
—refers to the
Six Bullerby Children
series by Astrid Lingren, which take place in the small Swedish village of Bullerby (Bullerbyn in Swedish)
Aryosophic
—member of an Aryosophic order created by Guido von List at the beginning of the nineteenth century
Norilsk
—infamous contaminated industrial town in Russia
Boliden and Rönnskär
—mining and smelting operations located near Skellefteå
satrap and hierodule
—satrap: general name given to a governor of a province in ancient Persia; hierodule: temple slave in ancient Greece, often associated with prostitution in service to a deity
ninjirkilkin
—“the shy one”; apprentice shaman among the Chukchi
Mister Malibog
—or else, Mister Horny
Forsyte Saga
—British television series based on
The Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
A Family at War
—British television series
pecarirodea
—a rodeo conducted with a
Pecari tajacu
, a “collared peccary”: a type of swine native to Central and South America
paddywacker
—police baton
Auntie Anita and Televinken
—Anita Lindman, who starred in the Swedish childrens television show
Anita och Televinken
; Televinken is a marionette
dascenter
—Swedish play on words, lit.
dass
(toilet) +
dase
(dick) + center, instead of
dagscenter
(day center)
nightrajah
—hip-long jacket
pyttepanna
—(also pyttipanna), traditional Scandinavian dish; usually consists of potatoes, onions and meat, which are diced-up and then pan-fried
Lasse Berghagen
—Swedish singer-songwriter
Poglavnik
—Ante Pavelic’s title when he ruled over Nazi-controlled Croatia during World War II
Assisted Living
has a rare quality: even when approached by relatively experienced readers, and people with strong stomachs in general, evidence shows that the novel has the power to give us at least a glimpse of that incredulity and confusion and delightful shock that a few of our first unsettling (and unsettling mainly because they were our first) reading experiences gave us. To be disturbed by a book is something that belongs to the childhood of our reading. Only as an exception, only very rarely are we blessed with being exposed to something similar later on in life. As we gradually put the years behind us, as we gradually see more, hear more, experience more, and read more, our chances of suffering a literary ambush are also reduced. We become situated, establish an overview, develop tastes, follow our preferences, know more or less what to expect if we go here or there; know pretty much what to expect as we embark upon page five or page seven. I, for my part, have to return to my youthful encounters with Burroughs/Miller/Genet to trump the almost puerile kick I got when I read Teratologen for the first time. “Chuckling at his impudence, weeping at histender sentiment, trembling with sorrow, paralyzed by hate”: he’s already summed it up pretty well himself, I think.
Assisted Living,
with its surplus of violence and obscenity, is, of course, not unique in literary history. Forerunners can be found in works by Rabelais, Lautréamont, de Sade, Apollinaire, Céline, Bataille, and Burroughs, to name just a few. Nonetheless, I believe that the novel has something truly original, especially in the way it combines the fairy tale with the surreal and the learned with the poetic, which in turn are mixed with a gruff, biting, and in many ways typical Nordic “rural realism.” The most striking thing about the novel is how complex it is, and how all-encompassing. In a mass of seemingly incompatible vegetation, it blooms explosively, evading most attempts to categorize it. Its a rough-cut and vulgar trash comedy. It’s a classic epic, with roots going back to the Middle Ages and Antiquity. Its a poetic hymn with some of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in Scandinavian postwar prose. Its an exhaustive study in perversion and taboo-breaking. And it’s a radically experimental novel, which in a crossfire of wordplay, allusions, and quotations, converses with (and makes sport of) the entirety of world literature. As such,
Assisted Living
is a book that contradicts itself at just about every turn. And it’s in this odd polysubstance abuse, in this wellspring of self-contradiction, that Teratologen has developed his distinct voice.
The fairy-tale tone, the grotesque exaggerations, the over-the-top fantasies, which, on the one hand, make it easy to distance oneself—my God, this is
too
wild!—are, at the same time, that unpredictable force in the text which puts us in direct contact with the harsh living conditions from which it (the text) springs. When Grandpa and the boy creep into Paul Holm’s cow barn and are ambushed by a monster with greedy cunts all over its body, or when stuffed authors and hydrocephalic skulls appear among the trophies in the rightwing Maoist’s [sic] rumpus room, its clear that, realistically speaking, plausibility has been discarded long ago and that the perfidious details are, therefore, not to be taken seriously. At the same time, it’s precisely because it’s all been laid on so thick, precisely because the details so thoroughly exceed the boundaries of probability and plausibility (and because they do so throughout the entire novel)—it’s precisely by virtue of these lunatic premises that the novel creates a version of re; ity that demands credibility. Obviously, the moment that the light from the seven-branch candelabra makes the rumpus room come to life “like a blood-clot,” it’s no longer a real space that we’re entering, but rather an all the more clearly defined
space of possibility.
In this way, a door is opened into the mental and emotional depths in us all. This is actually conceivable, it’s possible to imagine it, and, therefore, the possibility exists—in the individual, in us, in everyone.
One could say, using Kunderas words on Kafka, that the Upper Kåge Valley—övre
Kågedalen
—is “an extreme and unrealized possibility” (
The Art of the Novel
)
.
It’s the world according to the boy, and either we accept it or we don’t. Nonetheless, Grandpas relentless boasting and the first-person narrator’s tendency to distort anything and everything can be read as the last, desperate (read: literary) attempt of two degenerate and outcast souls to overcome their unbearable loneliness. The “dear friend’s” introductory comments regarding the appendix (“Memories of Grandpa”) supports this reading. And yes, perhaps it really is just the two of themmaking it all up … ? Perhaps the enchanted, devilish landscape is, in reality, nothing more than a gloomy, northern, deindustrialized, remote sort of place where nothing much happens … ? Perhaps the beastly murders and gory violence really are simply the quixotic daydreams of an old man and a boy the world forgot … ? It’s at this point that the endless transgressions and boundary-crossings of Teratologens tall tale takes on a tragic dimension, despite whatever wild and unbelievable hyperbolic heights the novel may reach. This idea invites a “realistic” interpretation of the novel, in which every character seems to have an aura of insane wishful thinking about them, an aura that, in the boys story, materializes in the form of real characteristics, real features, real artifacts in an obscene white-trash theater of dreams.
In
Downfall
(
Nedstörtad angel;
literally, “Fallen Angel”), Per Olov Enquist writes of the monsters in the first Satanic church in California that “They found themselves on humanity’s outermost edge: there, on the edge, they set up camp.” And: “They were themselves touchstones: deformed human beings showing on whose side one stood: perfect God’s, or imperfect man’s.” {My translation.—kap} I believe that it wouldn’t be far-fetched to give this perspective renewed validity in the case of Grandpa and the boy. It’s for this reason that the relationship between these two moral freaks makes such a strong impression, despite all conceivable forms of depravity and degradation. They’re isolated in their outcast state, they seek out isolation and cultivate it, they—or at least Grandpa, to the extent we can take him at his word—finds in being cast-out and isolatedfrom the general community a last dormant possibility to truly exist in the midst of a corrupted, late-capitalistic, affluent society.
Grandpa and the boy’s political stance is, therefore, more ambiguous than that which might derive from their alienation alone. With their ruthless destruction of life and value, they break with all norms of investment, production, and profit. The creation of value is replaced, in their case, with raw destruction and waste. Given their absolute violation of any existing formal or social law, then, they seem to have something heroic about them after all. They represent a freedom we can’t tolerate, a self-realization there’s no place for. And from their camping ground on humanity’s outermost edge, they sing (they screech and shout) the song of great irrevocable loneliness. Which isn’t a pretty song. But how could it be?
When faced with offensive literature, or literature that’s ethically problematic in some other way, it’s a common strategy first to praise it for its amoral or immoral attitude, and then conclude that the author’s project is, in reality,
deeply moral.
To wit: “Don’t worry, he’s one of us after all!” With Teratologen, however, it’s more difficult than that, since his books—in addition to
Assisted Living
(Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen,
1992), the novels
Förensligandet i det egentliga Västerbotten
(Alienation in True Västerbotten, 1998),
Hebberhålsapokryferna
(Hebberlhåls Apocrypha, 2003) and
Att hata allt mänskligt liv
(To Hate All Human Life, 2009), as well as a collection of aphorisms,
Apsefiston
(2002)—are all permeated by such an obvious enjoyment of and delight in the incessant dwelling upon that which, obeying whatever prevailing standard, must count as unacceptable andintolerable human behavior. And it’s precisely this maliciousness, this genuine anti-humanism, this heartfelt cynical and nihilistic attitude toward life and literature that gives
Assisted Living
its remarkable power. There’s an affinity for the perverted and degenerate that one can’t escape, that one can’t ignore, when reading this book. It’s there, all that we’re used to keeping our distance from, imparted with such poetic joy that anyone and everyone can ask themselves what it’s good for. And perhaps the answer is, it’s not good for anything. And perhaps that’s the real reason that the novel has proven so difficult for so many to swallow. And, presumably, the reader has a single choice before him-or herself: turn away in disgust, or be swept along for all you’re worth. Those who choose the latter are forced to look death in its white eye and laugh. Without this laughter,
Assisted Living
remains an unreadable book.
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