[ad_1]
In Jämtland, there are questions he doesn’t ask. Like where there are blackberries. People look away and answer something floating. And if you’ve ever seen that haunted facial expression, ask no more times.
But suddenly it happens. A neighbor asks me if I want to go pick up. Actually, he should have chosen with his cousin, but the cousin prevented him and his wife won’t let him choose himself because he is afraid of bears.
We took my car. You head into the woods, past rickety hunting towers and rusty road machines. Park on a plateau, through the bushes, and on the other side of the ridge, the swamp stretches out.
We applaud and plucks the golden berries from us. We don’t know each other very well. But it does nothing. A lengthy conversation soon ensues. We talk about our mothers. Her obsession with the fact that everything in the forest has to be taken care of, blueberries, lingonberries, jam and juices for the winter, fill the shelves with mason jars. My mother almost had hallucinations; that the berries screamed “fuck me too, and me too, well me then?” and she was almost forced to walk away from the blueberry rice. She was a mother of four children at 28 and I think her days were filled with valid and encouraging voices.
We are talking about all the berries that rot in the forests, 96 percent of all the blueberries, according to the review of Jonas Fröberg in DN, and the disease of the berry pickers who fly here from the other side of the world because it is It has become a task that we ourselves have become too good at.
I say it could be something the prisoners could do. They are forced to work anyway, right? Woodworking birdhouses or whatever they do.
– It may be too easy for them to escape, says the neighbor.
I look around me and think: where to escape then?
But we realize that no politician would come up with such a proposal, because it would sound too much like the worn-out populist grunt that prisoners should be sent to “cut down forests in Norrland”; hence forced labor as humiliation, because the punishments are so tame today, and so on.
But if you changed the signs around it, I say, and instead kept the constructive thing of lounging in the woods and being surrounded by silence and watching the bucket slowly fill up.
And I think of my own need to sink into the woods, and how friends sometimes assume that this is my supposed creative profession, and they seem to see in front of me how I weld my rubber boots and think of various storytelling problems.
But in the woods, I never think of narrative glitches or other issues for that matter. It is very uncertain if I think at all. Apart from putting one foot in front of the other, orienting myself on the ground and keeping track of where the dog has gone.
Blessed with walks in the woods is that I receive such compelling reminders of my insignificance. And my novel is so insignificant that there are hardly any words for it. I don’t understand why these reminders are so liberating. But they are. And when I get home and fold the computer, the narrative problem has been solved. Or it doesn’t. In that case, maybe I will do it tomorrow. It really is the same.
And I think of all the intended prisoners who would trample the swamp with their electronic foot shackles and drive away the mosquitoes and cajole the loose blackberries and throw themselves into the bucket. Shark even when a bird crackles in a thicket and soars into the air. Feel the splash of a light rain, and then shoot. And then comes a new one.
I think of how they fought to conquer their kingdoms in “places” here and there, rubbed their violent capital, slipped on their watches and slippers. And the shock when they are in a swamp in nowhere and they realize that their coin is no longer valid, because when the weather changes, you can wave the butterfly knife however you want.
Maybe i would too These gangsters little and big experience a liberation to be reminded of their insignificance.
– Blackberries are actually overrated blackberries, says the neighbor, half ashamed. I prefer raspberries.
But we get a couple of liters each and then we applaud the car.
Read more chronicles of Bengt Ohlsson
