Free Desert Divers by Sven Lindqvist Page A

almost uninterrupted, passionate surprise.’
    Then I also read the invisible words ‘Practise it!’
    Passionate surprise …?
    I loved my father, but had he ever been passionate? Did he even know what the word meant?
    Within me was a boundless need to be seized and elevated. Everything around me denied that need. Only in
Fruits of the Earth
was it understood: ‘Never stop, Natanael. As soon as an environment has become like you, or you like your environment, it is no longer any use to you. Then you must leave it. Nothing is more dangerous to you than
your
family,
your
room,
your
past.’
    Was I getting like my father? Would I become the Secretary of the Älvsjö branch of the Swedish Red Cross, as he was? Would I dilute my milk with water to spare my stomach? Would I live without travelling, without festivities, without thinking, without adventures?
    ‘Families, I hate you!’ says Menalces. Through a window, he sees a boy sitting reading beside his father. The next day Menalces meets the boy on his way back from school. The next day they talk to each other, and four days later ‘he left everything to come with me’.
    The biblical associations with the Apostles who left everything to follow the Master gave me the courage to abandon myself to such dreams: one day Someone would walk past in the November darkness out there on Långbrodal Road, Someone would see me though the window where I was bored to death doing my homework beside my father, and this Someone would call out to me and take me out into the great wide world outside Älvsjö.
    We would wander in that fatal moonlight over the desert. We would walk barefoot on smooth blue rocks, our eyelids cooled by the night.
    We would see the walls of desert cities turning red towards evening and glowing faintly on in the night – deep walls in which the midday light is stored. At night, they slowly repeat what the day has taught them.
    We would see Bou Saada. We would see Biskra. ‘Over the moonlit terraces in Biskra, Meriem comes to me through the tremendous silence of the night. She is entirely enveloped in a torn white haik which she laughingly lets fall as she stands there in the doorway …’
    After every sentence of that kind, I read with racing heart a secret
Practise it! Live it!
66
    Bou Saada, ‘the fortunate town’, lies in a hollow between three mountains. Its fortune is that its wells are connected to an underground lake constantly supplied with fresh water from the three mountains. The old wells can be thirty metres deep and irrigate twenty-four thousand date palms.
    Today the basis of the economy is not dates but oil. The powerful desert vehicles of the prospectors, covered in mud and sand, stand outside the Hotel Caida. The oil men swill beer in a bar like a swimming baths, their voices echoing between tiled walls. They gather noisily around the long tables in the dining room with their big laughs and big wallets. A small plate of soup and a mess of vegetables costs as much as a dinner at the luxurious Opera Cellar in Stockholm.
    Exchange rates create the image of the Foreigner. If the Foreigner is to appear powerful, rich and generous, then there has to be an exchange rate which makes everything cost about half what the Foreigner pays back home. If the Foreigner is to appear powerless, poor, stingy and complaining, then there has to be an exchange rate such as there is in Algeria.
    I am staying at the Hotel Transatlantic. When it opened in 1909, the Foreigner was rich and powerful. Then the water closets flushed, hot water rushed out of the taps from Jacob Delafont & Co in Paris, the piano was properly tuned, the lights in the chandeliers sparkled, the Ouled Nail girls danced and made love. Those were the days.
    Fruits of the Earth
speaks with rapture about these girls. Loti wrote a whole book about them. Maupassant praises them. He came across them at the Café Joie in the mainsquare and spread the rumour all over Europe that their wantonness was all