A Moth to a Flame Read online

  Stig Dagerman

  * * *

  A MOTH TO A FLAME

  Translated from the Swedish by Benjamin Mier-Cruz

  With an introduction by Siri Hustvedt

  Contents

  Introduction

  Blowing Out a Candle

  A Letter in February from Himself to Himself

  Prelude to a Dream

  A Letter in March from Himself to Himself

  Evening Promenades

  A Letter in April from Himself to Himself

  Tea for Four or Five

  A Letter in May from Himself to Himself

  Underwater Footprints

  A Letter to a Girl in Summer

  A Twilight Meeting

  A Letter to an Island in Autumn

  A Tiger and a Gazelle

  A Letter to the Father from the Son

  Three O’Clock

  A Torn-up Suicide Note

  When the Desert Blooms

  About the Author

  Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) was regarded as the most talented writer of the Swedish postwar generation. He wrote his first novel at twenty-two, and received widespread acclaim; critics compared his writing to the likes of Kafka, Faulkner and Camus. Over the course of the next five years he published prolifically, always to immense success, before suddenly falling silent. In 1954 Sweden was stunned to learn that he had taken his own life, at the age of thirty-one.

  Introduction

  When Stig Dagerman’s first novel, The Snake, was published in Sweden in 1945, it was received as a work by a raw new genius. Its author was twenty-two years old. For the next four years, the boy wonder kept up a flying pace. He produced a story collection, The Games of Night (1947), five plays, hundreds of poems, a now-classic work of journalism, German Autumn (1947), about the suffering of ordinary Germans after the war, and three novels: The Island of the Doomed (1946), A Moth to a Flame (1948), and Wedding Worries (1949). And then the seemingly indefatigable prodigy stopped running. Although he continued to compose satirical verses for a newspaper, he never finished another work of fiction. Dagerman lived in a state of paralyzed creativity for five years, and in 1954 he killed himself. A year after his death, a short autobiographical essay was published: “Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable.”

  While Dagerman is obscure in the English-speaking world, he remains a giant in Sweden, is known in many countries in Europe, and is beloved in France and Italy. Musing on why Dagerman has been eagerly welcomed in some places and ignored in others is probably futile. A writer’s posthumous fate is dependent on so many factors that an attempt to unravel them will result only in further knots.

  Scholars of A Moth to a Flame have made much of Dagerman’s left-wing politics, his relation to existentialism and naturalism, his involvement with Freudian thought, and his time – the post-war period in Europe. All of this is significant, but I am far more interested in why the novel escapes the strictures of reductive theory or a particular historical period. There are countless works of fiction that serve the time in which they were written. Lauded as brilliant in their day, they lose their shine as the years pass and take on a dull, wooden quality because what their authors had to say was illuminated by the lamp of a culture’s ephemeral platitudes, which, once extinguished, leave them in the dark.

  A Moth to a Flame is not such a book. It is a startling novel of ferocious psychological acumen, which, to my mind, deserves a large, international readership. The novel’s situation is simple: A woman is dead. She leaves behind her husband, her son, her son’s fiancée, and a fourth person: “the other woman.” The story, however, is complex. It follows the interactions among the living characters in relation to the shape-shifting ghost of the dead wife and mother within the morbid conventions and false pieties of the pinched, working-class world they inhabit. At its center is the twenty-year-old son, Bengt, whose conflicted mourning, revenge fantasies, sexual longings, self-deception, and general moral confusion are the engine of the book.

  Although the chapters of the novel are interspersed with letters Bengt writes to himself in the second person, to his fiancée, and to his father, the dominant narrative perspective has qualities more like a camera than a person; a camera with the uncanny power to penetrate the thoughts, emotions, and sensual perceptions of those it fixes within its frame. “A wife is to be buried at two o’clock,” the novel begins, “and at eleven-thirty the husband is standing in the kitchen in front of the cracked mirror above the sink.” Immediately caught up in the ongoing present tense of the narrative’s sequential cinematic movements, the reader also becomes a viewer.

  As on stage or in a film, the characters’ proper names are introduced in dialogue. We discover the dead woman’s name in the first chapter, when one of the anonymous “guests” gathered at the house before the funeral looks at her photograph and says, “Alma was pretty when she was young.” The shuttling between the distant identifications by relation – mother, son, father, fiancée – and the greater intimacy of names – Alma, Bengt, Knut, Berit – are key to the novel’s telescoping perspectives and continual permutations of feeling. After spying on his father and his mistress, a sexually aroused and furious Bengt engages in passionate, if hateful sex with his betrothed, Berit, who is oblivious to his real emotions. The two spent lovers lie in bed together:

  From the darkness, the fiancée stretches her pale arms up to him.

  You have made me so happy, she whispers.

  Then he leans over and kisses her rather coldly on her lips. They are too open, and one of them has a sore.

  This small passage is illustrative of Dagerman’s narrative technique – the remoteness created by the word fiancée juxtaposed by Bengt’s intimate proximity to Berit’s lips, suddenly repellent: the sore – but it also opens urgent questions posed by the novel as a whole. Is the person who fills us with love, hate, or disgust the real object of our emotion or is it someone else? And when we act on those feelings, do we know why?

  Sometimes we do something without knowing why. And once it is done, we are surprised that we did it. Or sometimes we are even afraid. But from that surprise, as well as the fear, comes an explanation. It has to come. Because the unexplained fills us with a dread that we cannot tolerate for long. But by the time the explanation is thought of or uttered, we have forgotten that it came after – that the deed came first.

  A Moth to a Flame turns on this gap between the irrational, unconscious act and the need for conscious justification that involves temporal disorientation. What came before and what came after? These explanatory thoughts or words, plucked from a repertoire of stultifying cultural clichés and easy answers, provide a screen for what must be hidden because the real reason is taboo and therefore unbearable. Because I am writing this at a moment when hackneyed phrases, shallow interpretations, and outright lies parade as explanations for seething hatreds, violent opinions, and brutal acts, I would say that this novel, beautifully translated into English by Benjamin Mier-Cruz, is very much a book for our times.

  Siri Hustvedt

  It is not true that a burnt child dreads the fire.

  It is drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

  It knows that when it goes near it, it will burn itself again.

  Still, it gets too close.

  Blowing Out a Candle

  A wife is to be buried at two o’clock, and at eleven-thirty the husband is standing in the kitchen in front of the cracked mirror above the sink. He hasn’t cried much, but he has lain long awake and the whites of his eyes are red. His shirt is white and bright, and his freshly ironed pants are faintly steaming. As his youngest sister adjusts the stiff white collar behind his neck and draws the white bow across his throat so tenderly that it feels like a caress, the widower le
ans over the sink and peers searchingly into his eyes. Then he rubs them as if wiping away a tear, but the back of his hand is still dry. The youngest sister, who is the beautiful sister, holds her hand still at his throat. The bow tie gleams white as snow against his ruddy skin. He furtively strokes her hand. The beautiful sister is the sister he adores. For he adores anything beautiful. The wife was ugly and sick. Which is why he has not been crying.

  The ugly sister is standing at the stove. The gas is hissing, and the lid of the shiny coffeepot is bobbing up and down. With red fingers, she fumbles after the valves to turn it off. She has lived in town for twelve years now, but she still hasn’t figured out the gas valves. She wears black-rimmed glasses, and whenever she wants to look someone in the eye, she leans in closely and stares awkwardly. Finally, she finds the right valve and turns it off.

  Should it be a white tie for a funeral?

  It is the beautiful sister who asks. The widower is fiddling with his cuff links. He has long black shoes, and they squeak when he abruptly stands on his toes. But the ugly sister spins around sharply as if someone had come at her.

  White to a funeral! I should know after the consul’s!

  Then she purses her lips. Her eyes blink behind her glasses as if they were afraid. They probably are. She knows all about funerals but almost nothing about weddings. The beautiful sister smiles and continues making adjustments and being caressed. The ugly sister moves a vase of white flowers from the table to the sink. The widower looks in the mirror again and suddenly finds himself smiling. He closes his eyes and breathes in the smell of the kitchen. For as long as he can remember, funerals have smelled like coffee and sweaty sisters.

  But a mother will also be buried, and the son is twenty years old and nothing. He is standing by himself under the ceiling light in the room full of people. His eyes are a little swollen. He has flushed them with water after a night of crying and thinks no one will notice. But in reality everything is noticeable, so the funeral guests have left him alone. Not out of respect but out of fear, because the world is afraid of those who cry.

  The father stands perfectly still for a while, not even playing with his cuff links or tugging at his mourning band. The golden pendulum clock, a fiftieth birthday present, strikes a thin, thin note. The guests are standing by the windows and murmuring. Their voices are veiled in mourning, but someone from the father’s side is tapping a march on the windowsill with his knuckles. The knuckles are hard and he wishes they would stop. But they don’t. Then someone who traveled all the way from the country turns on the radio, although it isn’t even noon yet. It hums and hums, but no one has the sense to turn it off.

  Soundlessly, the January light falls into the room and gleams over all the shiny, squeaky shoes. At the center of the room there is a large and freshly vacant space under the ceiling light, where the son is standing by himself and watching and listening to everything. Although he is really somewhere else. Before his mother died and he ended up alone, there used to be a long oak table where he is standing, but now the table is by the window. A white tablecloth is spread over it and on top of the cloth are glasses, carafes with dark wine, fifteen fragile white cups, and a big brown cake that is sweet but will taste bitter. Today, the mother’s portrait is on this very window-table, behind the carafes in a heavy black frame. It is wreathed with greenery, January’s precious greenery. As the funeral coffee brews, and the pastor shaves at the parsonage, and the gas tanks of the funeral cars are filled in the garage, the eleven guests gather around the table and the photograph of the deceased. She is young in the photograph. Her hair is still thick and dark, and it drapes heavily over her smooth brow. Her teeth, which are scarcely visible between her round lips, are white and untarnished.

  She was twenty-five then, one of them says.

  Twenty-six, corrects another.

  Alma was pretty when she was young.

  Yes, Alma was good-looking, all right.

  Yes, when she was young, she was good-looking.

  So you can understand why Knut, why Knut … um …

  Then they remember the son, who is standing in the room and listening.

  She had pretty hair, someone chimes in. Much too quickly.

  She was already expecting the girl by then.

  Oh, she had a daughter?

  Should’ve had, but she died.

  As a baby?

  She was just a year old. And then they had the boy, but they were married by then.

  Then they remember him again, and this time they stay quiet. Someone pulls out a big white handkerchief and blows his nose. The radio is finally turned off. Then they step aside with squeaking steps because the coffee is coming. The nice aunt, whom he likes because she has been crying behind her glasses, is carrying the pot. She carries it high and dignified like a candlestick, and she is sweating through her tight, black dress. The younger aunt comes in behind her. She has black silk stockings, and the men in the room forget the occasion and admire her beautiful legs. She smiles at someone briefly. She has not been crying.

  The father comes in last. Slowly and with a dejected gaze, he walks toward the son. Everyone has now turned around and stopped talking – even the one tapping the march has fallen silent. The father is silent, too. Silent and alone, they come together in the middle of the room. Their hands meet, and their arms meet. Then their chests meet. Finally, their eyes meet. Not long, yet long enough for both to see who has been crying and who is dry-eyed.

  Don’t cry, my boy, the father says.

  He says it quietly, but everyone still hears it. One of the guests lets out a sob, much too briefly, however. Shoes are squeaking and dresses are rustling like footsteps among leaves. The father’s arm is as hard as stone.

  Don’t cry, my boy, he says once again.

  Then the son gently frees himself from the man who has not cried. Alone, he walks all the way from his spot underneath the light to the table with the steaming cups and brimming glasses. Someone standing in the way bashfully steps aside. Without shaking, he picks up a cup, then a glass, and slowly turns around.

  The father is still standing there, his stone arm hanging, as if wounded, on his right side. Slowly, he lowers his head and bends one of his red ears down. But it isn’t until the sun starts to beam through the windows that the son notices how unexpectedly bright the father’s eyes are. Then he spills a few drops of the dark, bitter wine on the floor between his shoes.

  Before the cars arrive, they stand around in groups in different parts of the room. Four are standing under the chiming pendulum clock with glasses in their hands. They take sips when no one is looking. They are the widower’s relatives from the country, the ones you only see at weddings and funerals and whose clothes smell like mothballs. They look at the expensive clock. Then at each other. They look at the expensive encyclopedia with its leather binding glistening behind the glass of the bookcase. Then they glance at each other again and take another sip. At once, they are whispering with lips moistened by coffee and wine. They have never cared for the deceased.

  Underneath the ceiling light, the sisters are standing with four of the father’s friends who took a Monday morning off to attend the funeral. Perhaps there could have been more, but not even the ones who came cared for the deceased. Nevertheless, they talk about her for a moment with subdued, muffled voices. Then they change the subject, but their voices remain the same.

  The widower and the son are standing by one of the windows with three of the next-door neighbors: two women happy to experience a little variety and a man on sick leave. The son is standing closest to the window and has put down his glass and cup on the windowsill between two flowerpots. He knows that the neighbors disliked his mother, so he doesn’t care to listen. Still, the one who is sick talks about his illness. The two female neighbors talk about other illnesses. And the widower talks about the deceased’s illness. She had had a bad heart and had been bloated with water. In low voices, they talk about frail hearts and water.

  Me
anwhile, the son is looking out the window. He knows they will also be looking out the window soon, so he hurries to see as much as he can. He sees the blue tracks of the streetcar line, white with ice and salt along the bend. He sees freezing little snowflakes floating down to the street. He sees blue smoke rising from the chimney of a warm shelter. Some workmen, who had been tearing up the pavement with a drill and some picks, put their tools down, blow white smoke into their hands, and take a break. A cat is creeping through the snow, and directly across it a straddle-legged dray horse is peeing yellow and violently into the gutter.

  The entire time, the sun is gleaming on a gilded bull’s head above a butcher shop. Everything is as usual in that shop. The door swings open and shut by people with vaporous breath. Meat is on display on white plates in the window, and the shop assistants raise their sharp cleavers behind the marble counter. Like so many times before, he leans against the window so closely that it fogs up from his hot breath. Like so many times before, yet not like those first few days – for it was worse in the beginning. In those days, the entire windowpane fogged up after only a moment, and he had had to grab his hand and pull it down to his pocket so that it wouldn’t break free and shatter the pane. He also had to bite his lips so that his mouth wouldn’t fly open and shout, Why haven’t you closed? You, down there! How could you! Why don’t you hang sheets over your windows? Why don’t you lock up your doors? Why are you letting your vans still deliver meat when you know what’s happened? You butchers! You ruthless butchers! Why are you letting everything go on as usual when you know that everything has changed?

  He is calmer now and merely leans forward and watches. Merely leans forward and breathes. Merely shifts his gaze like a telescope toward the gilded bull’s head and the tall display window with its heaping mountains of meat. Merely presses his thighs painfully hard against the windowsill. Merely thinks, My mother died in there. My mother died in there while my father was sitting in the kitchen shaving and while I, her son, was sitting in my room playing poker with myself. In there, she fell off a chair without one of us there to catch her. It was in there that she lay on the floor amid the dirt and sawdust while a butcher stood with his back to her, cutting up a sheep.