Assisted Living: A Novel Read online

  Originally published in Swedish as Äldreomsorgen i Övre Kågedalen by Norstedts Förlag, Stockholm, 1992

  Copyright © 1992 by Nikanor Teratologen (Nidas Lundkvist)

  Translation copyright © 2011 by Kerri A. Pierce

  Afterword © 2011 by Stig Saeterbakken

  First edition, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Teratologen, Nikanor.

  [Äldreomsorgen i övre kägedalen. English]

  Assisted living / Nikanor Teratologen; translated by Kerri A. Pierce; afterword by Stig Sterbakken. --1st ed. p. cm.

  “Originally published in Swedish as Äldreomsorgen i övre Kägedalen by Norstedts Förlag, Stockholm, 1992.”

  ISBN 978-1-56478-682-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  I. Pierce, Kerri A. II. Title.

  PT9876.3.E73A79 2012

  839.73’74--dc23

  2011040673

  Partially funded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Swedish Arts Council

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  Cover: design and composition by Danielle Dutton, illustration by Nicholas Motte

  Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America www.dalkeyarchive.com

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Note

  Nikanor Teratologen s Preface

  A Dear Friend’s Foreword

  Assisted Living

  Appendix: Memories of Grandpa

  Afterword

  “Schizo-laughter or revolutionary joy, that is what emanates from great books, in place of the anguishes of our little narcissism or the terrors of our guilt …

  “An indescribable joy always rushes out of great books, even when they speak of ugly, hopeless, or terrifying things.”

  — Gilles Deleuze

  “Even if your home lies at the gates of hell, you still long for your birthplace.”

  — Norrlandish proverb

  “Fairy tales live here yet, and tell us what you were in days past—home to great deeds and virtue.”

  — “Västerbotten,”

  printed in the newspaper of the same name, 1921

  I want to thank the prince of this world (John 12:31), without whom this book couldn’t have been written.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Assisted Living is written in Skelleftemål, a dialect found in northern Sweden. This presents the English translator with yet another version of the eternal question: how much of the original text does one try to keep, and how much does one allow to be “lost in translation”? After careful consideration, and a few failed experiments, I decided to translate the book into more or less “good English.” After all, I asked myself, and speaking as an American, what could approximate a Swedish dialect in US English? Should I try to make the book sound “regional”? Should backwoods Swedes talk like stereotypical southern “hicks”? Even if I could pull off an authentic sounding text—no mean feat in itself—why should someone from Sweden sound like they’re from south Texas? (As a Texas native, a Texas drawl was foremost in my mind.) But, no. Translators must always walk that fine line between the original text and their new translation. In creating something new, something will always be lost—and perhaps gained. As Nikanor Teratologen, reviewing the English text, recently put it: “What we have here is a good Luciferan read.”

  If I’ve done my job, the reader will agree.

  KERRI A. PIERCE

  ASSISTED LIVING

  Or, Caring for the Elderly in Upper Kågedalen

  NIKANOR TERATOLOGEN’S PREFACE

  A dear friend with exquisitely cruel tastes entrusted me with the text you now hold in your hand.

  This friend, a man of both honor and lust, strongly insists that he retain his anonymity.

  I, supervisor of all sovereign creatures, chronicler of dead voices, guarantor of the world order, thus place myself between him and the other human animals. Thus do I say to cocknibblers and assassins alike: come to me … we’ll see if the masterhand won’t clench itself in the right orifice …

  I’ve always preferred pick-up sticks to chess anyway …

  A DEAR FRIEND’S FOREWORD

  Last summer I murdered an eleven-year-old boy. He said his name was Helge Holmlund from Hebbershålet in Upper Kågedalen, North Västerbotten. We met at a urinal in Tivoli just as Mens Night was dosing in on Childrens Day. He struck me as the quiet, frail type—and it was love at first sight. I took him home, and after he’d performed certain services, I tied him up and locked him in the soundproof cellar I use for such occasions.

  For six whole days he gave me exquisite pleasure. After that, I hacked his body into small pieces, wrapped the meat in plastic, priced it, and distributed the packages to a number of different display cases in and around Skellefteå.

  I kept his head for my little collection.

  While I was burning the boy’s clothes and other things, I found a hefty stack of old wallpaper samples tucked in his ratty leather backpack. Each sample was scribbled over in a child’s erratic, immature hand, the words all written in different colored pencils. As I made my way through a few of these fragments, words utterly failed me. A brave new world opened before my eyes—one of vile pleasures and terrifying abominations—with the power to touch me in ways I no longer thought possible. Chuckling at his impudence, weeping at his tender sentiment, trembling with sorrow, paralyzed by hate—I sorted these rough fragments and organized them into a number of offensively seductive stories, each one presumably written by the dead boy.

  My philological training proved extremely useful in tackling the difficulties posed by these unusually precocious recollections, which the boy had misleadingly entitled Assisted Living. I also made discrete inquiries into the poor boys past, a quest that took me far off the beaten path and into the dark and brooding Northland nightwoods, home to more terrifying legends than any one person is capable of taking in. I wandered down what seemed to me contaminated paths through a hazardous landscape. On both sides of the Kågeälven, the dark river, the earth is fertile and the view open. I could see dirty-gold barley fields, resilient swaths of hay pasture, fallow fields, and hopeful new patches of almond potatoes, all stretching away before me; there were graying Västerbotten farmhouses in various states of decay, though clumps of willow trees and stands of birches try to hide the worst of it. Each of these farmhouses is set well back from the road and has a long approach leading up to it. It’s obvious that the people in these parts want to know who’s coming; they keep to their own. However, you can still find a few beautiful old Västerbotten farms scattered here and there: dark red timber houses with white doors, small porches, and shingled roofs. For the most part, though, pale and dull dwellings, each one identical to its neighbor, have takenover the region. The empty cow barns (which the locals call fusen) yawn empty. Now they use silos. In these parts, there’s a chapel for every ten homesteads. Everything’s modest and respectable, people pride themselves on their rancor and cunning both. Only old people are left now, out in the country, though in the sparsely populated regions of Ersmark and Kusmark a few communities still try to scrape by: making condoms for Skega and crying outside their closed church. Mystery has vanished from the forests surrounding the riverbed. Winter in these parts is hard. Blizzards numb all human feelings; one’s gaze turns inward. During the long winter, people do their best to forget. Imperceptibly the valley fades away, the colors change. Spruces and pines cover the gently descending hillsides. A spiderweb of w
oodland roads (leading nowhere) spreads throughout the forest. Everything is condemned to be cut down and carted away. The trees are taller and darker here; their melancholy is more powerful than life. The fact that the valley has no visible borders makes escape impossible.

  Farther up, the scene remains unchanged. In fact, the character of the dell becomes even more pronounced where Kågedalen nears its end—until, finally, it becomes transcendental. A large power line running from Svartbyn in Norrbotten to Jälta in Ångermanland splits the countryside in half. The forest here draws close to the rugged dirt road; the same is true of the humble homes in the small villages. Every now and then you catch a glimpse of cultivated land: forest-clad ridges crisscrossed by brown swaths of clear-cutting; forgotten, outworn meadows—once worked, now overgrown—boldly marching down toward Hebbersbäcken’s shallow watercourse. At Slyberget this creek joins the northward-bound Kågeälven, before proceeding alongside the road to Bottenviken. In short, the landscape in Upper Kågedalen is nerve-wracking, bewitching, and pristine. People here aren’t too concerned with planting and harvest time; something else fills their minds. The observer is overwhelmed by the mood of sorrow, severity, and loneliness that pervades the atmosphere. The air here is clear, you see all too clearly, but the forest holds an eternal darkness. Human hands could never rob the countryside of its austere grandeur. The old people in these parts are cut from the same cloth. When the time comes, they hang themselves— silently, calmly, expertly—from the rafters of the abandoned cow barns. Grand gestures have no place here. No one even talks about it. What would be the point?

  Naturally, I questioned the people in the villages of Upper Kågedalen under false pretenses. Still, they met this polite and scholarly stranger with silent gestures meant to ward him off; and, more often than not, with curses or the evil eye. I preferred concentrating on the shier old men—frail and soft, infant-voiced and doe-eyed— who, after a litany of stops and starts, would finally start rooting around in their own overwhelming oblivion and return with what they found there, which they would pronounce in voices like the newly weaned. Hebbersfors, Hebbersliden, Hebbersholm were all familiar. However, no one knew anything about Hebbershålet. People insisted they’d never heard of, much less met, an old man with a little grandson. It seemed Holger Holmlund was an unknown party. The same was true of Helge. Names from their circle of acquaintance likewise turned up nothing. In the end, banal reality threatened to bury myself and my fantasies beneath its everyday offal.

  It began to dawn on my, by this time, that not even the national registry could help me. I’d just about given up. One day, however, just after I had radiated my colony of Necrophorus investigators to death, someone came pounding on my door. When I opened it, there was no one there—just a letter nailed to the doorpost with a dagger. I wrenched the dagger out of the wood, made sure I was alone, and relocked the door. The letter was typed and didn’t have a return address. I’ve reproduced this letter below, though I’ve edited out certain insulting comments regarding my lifestyle choices:

  “…The old man, may Old Nick’s poisoned piss rot his guts, was born on October 7,1900, the same day as Heinrich Himmler. His mother was a peddler and a whore. Of course, her life was short. When she died, her father took in her little urchin. He’d been a widower for many years, he was used to going his own way. His property lay off the beaten path. No one went there if they could help it. Neither critter nor cretin was safe in Hebbershålet after dark. People say he was a tall, pale chap, a beanpole with glasses, as queer as the day is long. He put on airs, walked quick and proud, thought he was better than everyone else. ‘Better to be tall and dangerous than short and lame, he’d say.’ Or: ‘A devil in the flesh is better than ten in the bush.’ He raised the boy to take his place. Holger Holmlund was the old man’s name and he baptized the boy ‘Holger,’ in wolf’s blood. He never had a word for anyone. He could’ve said a mouthful, though, if he’d had a mind to. Black sheep and goats were the only animals he kept. He looked human, though that was just for show. He had books of black magic, and my own Grandpa told me he could flay your skin off with a look. Holger the Elder died on Hilarymas Day, 1910. The minnows were spawning in Hebbersbäcken, and everyone had joined in the catch. Folk said old Holger had been looking green about the gills, but no one thought much of it. That evening he took his usual enema. What happened next is anyone’s guess. The old devil you’re looking for, the one who lived to be ninety-one, till someone offed him last fall, said his Grandpa fell asleep at the table with his head on his hands. Suddenly, the old man jumped up and screamed: Smaajj å utajj!’ [Geld and destroy! my translation]. Then he grabbed the boy by the ankles and bashed his head against the wall. The next Sunday morning, three days after Hilarymas, the congregation came shuffling to church in their Sunday best, the boldest chewing tobacco and gnawing on licorice strands they’d stolen from murdered, hair-collecting Jews. And there on the steps of the chapel, what do you think they saw? Old Grandpa’s cold, dead head whistling tunes from Parsifall When the congregation was within earshot, he greeted them like nothing was amiss. Then he offered to suck dick in exchange for a smoke. For a drink he’d be happy to lick a woman, but only in the ass. People hissed and shook their fists. But the head just laughed and aped them, doing freakishly accurate impersonations, and spouted out all sorts of other foolishness beyond belief. He made animal sounds, howled like a soul in hell, moaned like a virgin in heat. But the worst of all was his laugh … Finally, a group of dogged sextons rushed the thing with crowbars. They thrashed his skull as hard as they could. Its pate cracked and blood dribbled from the wounds. The oldest sexton, a man called Epileptic Martin, even poked one of old Holgers eyes out. Thenhe picked up the head and spit on it. But old Holger—he went on the attack! He bit off Martins nose and overlip! At that the sextons grabbed a snow shovel and used it to scoop up the head and toss it in an oven. They could still hear the old bastard jabbering, though, even as the fire was scorching away his flesh. And when they finally took the head out, what do you think they saw? The skull was white and shiny, impossible to scratch or crack. No one knows what happened to the head after that … Little Holger recovered and learned to take care of himself. No one would have anything to do with him. He was a miserable little bugger; no one even noticed when he left his Grandpas house. He came back years later carrying Spanish influenza in a pigs bladder. He was something fey, you know, something that shouldn’t have been. He certainly wasn’t human … But you won’t find anyone around here who’ll tell you about him—not enough time has passed, the wounds are still too fresh. No one wants you here, you don’t belong here. The less you know about the old man, the better. Give up now—it’ll go bad for you here … We’re your worst nightmare …”

  Signed: “Momus.”

  In this, our blessed extrauterine season, wherein all thoughts and feelings are but memories, if that, I took this letter to be a decree. It was meant to silence me, but it had the opposite effect. It put all my doubts to rest. With the kind support of my good-hearted friend Nikanor, I decided to publish these stories, which are like screams from the heart of an inferno. I know there’ll be an attempt on my life, but I’m not afraid of it.

  The stories were originally written in the country dialect of North Västerbotten. I’ve translated them into “plain” language, and when necessary I’ve provided a glossary at the end of the boy’s texts. The following resources have proven invaluable: T. Marklunds Skelleftemålet, E. Westerlund’s (ed.) Folkmål I Skelleftebygden, and M. Hellqvist’s Bättre grå kaka än ingen smaka. Assisted Living follows the organizational principle used by the dead child: each little wallpaper sample is numbered. However, it’s fairly clear that the numbering system has nothing to do with the date on which the fragment was written. It’s also apparent that several fragments have gone missing.

  I’ve entitled the appendix “Memories of Grandpa.” The testimonies it contains, which were supposedly written by Holger Holmlund s “friends and enemies,”
are almost certainly fictional—fantasies the boy used to try and dull his grief at his beloved Grandpa’s death. Any further interpretation we’ll leave to the feeble-minded.

  As for the character of Grandpa: I picture him as a disreputable aristocrat whose knowledge of the classics would bore you to tears; an amiable and well-mannered man with biting wit, pampered flesh, and perverse energy. A hundred and ninety centimeters tall, fifty-five kilos light, appallingly beautiful. To my mind, he combined a satanic, sado-Nazi latrine-type vulgarity with the despondent devotion that can only come from the beaten and mangled sensitivities of a truly delicate soul. He might as well have been the founder of a new Teratology. He strove for the miraculous and the monstrous; it was this quest that kept him going. As befits an absurdist nihilist, he lived life freely … his path to the numinous took him straight through the scabrous … His adventures belong to the oral tradition. They should be read aloud in the cellars of haunted houses by the light of a dying fire, making sure to disguise the voice.

  A child should read the little kids story, including his spoken lines. It’s important to remember that these are stories written by a child for his fellow children.

  Furthermore, Grandpa’s sacred sentences should be read by only the oldest, meanest, ugliest creature in the group. The rest will fraternally share out the parts of the women and other minor characters.

  May Grandpa’s voice drip with spite, derision, and scorn! May it creak with depravity and be oiled with bile! Don’t forget that he can adopt a genially cringing tone when it serves his purposes! May Hildingarna hiss with extinguished voices! May anarchic freedom reign!