Kallocain Read online

  Linda’s search for freedom and authenticity reflects the dominant note in Boye’s life and work. She lived in an era in which creating art that spoke out for truth and personal liberation could in itself be a heroic act. Peter Weiss, the German writer, artist and experimental film-maker (who adopted Swedish nationality), recognized this when he recreated Karin Boye as a character in the third volume (as yet untranslated into English) of his tripartite novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance, 1975–1981). In 1939, at the age of twenty-two, after periods of residence with his family in England and in Czechoslovakia, fleeing Nazi persecution, Weiss moved to the small township of Alingsås, near Göteborg, Sweden, where his father ran a textile factory. Alingsås was at that time where the writer and theologian Anita Nathorst, Karin Boye’s friend and counsellor, had her home, and Boye visited the town regularly to stay with her. It appears that during 1939 and 1940, Boye and Weiss met and formed a brief friendship that was broken when Boye ended her life in Alingsås in 1941. Weiss’s clear and vivid portrait of her in his novel seems to be drawn from lived reality:

  This woman, still young, with a small, delicate figure, a thin, boyish countenance, short-cut dark hair, dark eyes, and heavily drawn black eyebrows, sat quietly beside my mother, looking at her and stroking her hands from time to time. I learned that it was the writer Boye, who lived in Bratt’s guest house. Her shyness prevented the start of a conversation for a long time, yet she had an almost single-minded devotion to my mother, and not until the autumn, once when she had come alone and I accompanied her to the street, did we exchange a few words, and entered into a dialogue that was initially hesitant but became more and more extensive, lasting – each time interrupted for a month – until the end of March Nineteen Hundred and Forty-One … 8

  Weiss’s anonymous narrator says that, at some deep psychological level, Boye wanted to fuse with the masses, but that, in the context of the world situation, was not motivated by a desire for life – rather, by a mounting despair and a wish for disappearance and annihilation. Nevertheless, in Weiss’s novel, Boye is a heroic figure who stands alongside members of the real-life ‘Rote Kapelle’, or Red Orchestra – some 400 people who resisted the Nazi regime in various capacities. Many of these resisters had connections in Sweden, and moved between Sweden and Germany in secret. In Weiss’s novel, Boye is included in their ranks as a brave fighter against fascism who, like them, has acquired an almost legendary status in world history:

  What she portrayed was not utopia, as I had assumed, but examination of the present day; the time-shifts that seemed to cause a detachment from our reality pointed to what existed now. The guilt that she carried within her was less about sexual conflicts than about being party to the inability of people to stop the development of the state into an instrument of murder.9

  Kallocain is the summation of Karin Boye’s poetic and literary career, and also her testament as a human being. While before in her writing she had sought to build an inner cosmos, a realm accessed by hymn-like poems that moved beyond and behind physical reality, in Kallocain she portrayed the reality of the contemporary world in terms of a dreamlike, psychoanalytic vision that reproduced the features of collectivist society while also reflecting the ethical and spiritual conflicts on which her poetry was founded. This gave her the strength to defy the oncoming demons in the outside world with a conviction that external reality was only apparently invincible: the intense, inner idealism of her poetic credo asserts itself in the story of Linda and her journey towards the ‘fools’ – the dissidents capable of building an alternative society, even if their struggle is wrought at the expense of their own lives. By courageously submitting to their fate, the dissidents nonetheless survive and fulfil the conditions of T. S. Eliot’s mantra-like phrase quoted in the epigraph: ‘the awful daring of a moment’s surrender’. Beyond the pall of hopelessness in which the novel at times appears shrouded, there is a glimmer of hope. Under the influence of the truth drug, Rissen says:

  I’m a cog. I’m a creature from which they have taken the life … And yet: right now I know that it isn’t true. It’s the Kallocain that’s making me full of irrational hope, of course – everything is becoming light and clear and calm. At least I’m alive – in spite of all they have taken from me – and right now I know that what I am is on the way somewhere. I have seen death’s power spread out across the world in wider and wider circles – but must not life’s power also have its circles, even though I haven’t been able to see them? … Yes, yes, I know that it’s the effect of the Kallocain, but can’t it be true, even so?

  NOTES

  1. Margit Abenius: Drabbad av renhet ([Afflicted by Purity], Bonniers, 1950), my translation. No full-length biography of Karin Boye exists in English. The major biographical studies by Margit Abenius (Drabbad av renhet) and Johan Svedjedal (Den nya dagen gryr [The New Day Dawns] Wahlström & Widstrand, 2017) still await translation. A condensed English-language biography forms the introduction to Karin Boye: Complete Poems (Bloodaxe, 1994).

  2. Quoted in Svedjedal, op. cit.

  3. Abenius, op. cit.

  4. Erika Gottlieb: Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

  5. Gunnar Ekelöf: ‘Kallocain’ in Blandade kort (Bonniers, 1957).

  6. Ekelöf, op. cit.

  7. Boye’s concept of love was derived from Buddhism and Sufi mysticism, and it embraced a very wide spectrum of experience, thought and emotion. Ultimately it was a semi-religious concept that appealed to figures like UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who mentioned, discussed and quoted her poetry in his diaries. See Dag Hammarskjöld, tr. Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden, Markings (Faber & Faber, 1964).

  8. Peter Weiss: Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [The Aesthetics of Resistance] (Suhrkamp, 1975–81), my translation.

  9. Peter Weiss: op. cit., my translation.

  CHAPTER 1

  The book I now sit down to write will inevitably appear pointless to many – if indeed I dare suppose that ‘many’ will ever have a chance to read it – since quite on my own initiative, without anyone’s orders, I am beginning a task of this kind and yet am myself not really clear about its purpose. I will and must, and that is all. Ever more inexorable are the demands for purpose and method in what is done and said, so that not a word shall fall at random – it is only the author of this book who has been compelled to go the other way, out into futility. For although my years here as prisoner and chemist – they must be over twenty, I imagine – have been full enough of work and hurry, there must be something that feels this to be insufficient, and has directed and envisioned another task within me, one that I myself had no possibility of envisioning, and in which I nevertheless have had a deep and almost painful interest. That task will be completed when I have written my book. So although I realize how absurd my writings must appear in the light of all rational and practical thinking, I shall write all the same.

  Perhaps I would not have dared to do it before. Perhaps imprisonment has simply made me light-headed. My living conditions now are not very different from those I experienced as a free man. The food turned out to be slightly worse here – I got used to that. The bunk turned out to be somewhat harder than my bed back home in Chemistry City No. 4 – I got used to that. I was able to go out in the open air somewhat more rarely – that, too, I got used to. The worst thing was the separation from my wife and children, particularly as I knew and still know nothing of their fate: this was something that filled the first years of my imprisonment with worry and anxiety. But in time I began to feel calmer than before, and increasingly comfortable with my existence. Here I had nothing to worry about. I had neither subordinates nor superiors – apart from the prison guards, who seldom disturbed my work, and concerned themselves merely with seeing that I obeyed the regulations. I had neither protectors nor rivals. The scientists with whom I was sometimes brought together, so that I could keep abreast of new research in the field of chemistry, treated me with polite dispassion, apart from some condescension because of my foreign nationality. I knew that none of them thought they had any reason to envy me. To put it briefly: in a way I sometimes felt that I was freer than I would be in freedom. But alongside the calm, there also grew within me this strange labour with the past, and now I shall be unable to rest until I have written down my memories from a certain eventful period in my life. Because of my scientific work it has been made possible for me to write, and there is no inspection until the moment I deliver a completed assignment. So I can afford myself this single pleasure, even though it may be the last one I am granted.

  At the time my story begins I was approaching my forties. Perhaps if I am to introduce myself I may tell you about the image I had of life. There are few things that say more about a person than their image of life: whether they see it as a road, a battlefield, a growing tree or a rolling sea. For my part I saw it with the eyes of a well-behaved schoolboy, as a staircase up which you hurried from landing to landing as fast as you could, panting for breath and with your rival at your heels. In actual fact I had few rivals. Most of my colleagues at the laboratory had invested all their ambition in the military, and viewed their day’s work as a tedious but necessary diversion from the evening’s military duties. I would not have liked to admit to any of them how much more interested I was in my chemistry than in my military service, though I was by no means a bad soldier. At any rate, I kept on climbing my staircase at full tilt. How many stairs had to be climbed was something I had never considered, let alone what wonderful things might be in the attic. Perhaps I hazily imagined the house of life as similar to one of our ordinary city buildings, where you climbed up out of the bowels of the earth and finally emerged on the roof terrace in the open air, in wind and daylight. What the wind and the daylight would correspond to in my life’s journey I had no clear idea. But it was certain that each new landing on the staircase was marked by short official messages from higher up: about a successful exam, a passed test, a transfer to a more important field of activity. I also had a whole series of such life-altering endings and beginnings behind me, yet not so many that a new one would lose its significance beside them. It was therefore with a dash of fever in my blood that I returned from the short telephone call informing me that I might expect my control chief to arrive the following day, and so could start experimenting on human material. Thus, tomorrow the final and crucial test of my greatest discovery to date would take place.

  Such was my elation that during the ten minutes that still remained of my working hours I found it hard to make a start on anything new. Instead, I cheated a little – for the first time in my life, I believe – and began to put the apparatus away early, slowly and carefully, while stealing a glance through the glass walls on both sides to see if anyone had noticed me. As soon as the bell rang to announce that work was over for the day, I hurried out through the long laboratory corridors, where I was one of the first in the stream. I quickly showered, changed out of my work clothes and into my leisure uniform, jumped into the paternoster lift and a few moments later was up on the street. As our apartment had been allocated in the district where my work was, we had surface permits there, and I always enjoyed the chance to stretch my legs in the fresh air.

  As I was passing the metro station it occurred to me that I might as well wait for Linda. Since I was so early, she had probably not yet got home from her food factory, over twenty minutes’ metro ride away. A train had recently arrived, and a flood of people welled up out of the ground, squeezed through the barriers, where the surface permits were checked, and trickled out over the surrounding streets. Over the now empty roof terraces, over all the rolled-up dark-grey and meadow-green tarpaulins, which in the space of ten minutes could render the city invisible from the air, I watched the swarming horde of homeward-bound fellow soldiers in leisure uniform, and it suddenly struck me that perhaps they all had the same dream that I had: the dream of the way up.

  The thought gripped me. I knew that in the olden days, during the civilian era, people had to be lured to work and exertion by the hope of more spacious accommodation, better food and more attractive clothes. Nowadays nothing like that was needed. The standard apartment – one room for the unmarried, two for families – was sufficient for all, from the lowliest to the most deserving. The food from the house kitchen brought satiety to the general as well as to the private. The regular uniform – one for work, one for leisure and one for the military and police service – was the same for all, for man and woman, and for high and low, except for the rank markings. Even the latter were no more ostentatious for one person than for another. The desirable feature of a higher executive marking lay only in what it symbolized. So loftily ethereal is each single fellow soldier in the World State, I mused happily to myself, that what he considers to possess the highest value has no more tangible form for him than three black loops upon his sleeve – three black loops that are a pledge both of his own self-respect and of respect from others. It is indeed possible to have enough of material comforts, and more than enough – and for precisely that reason I suspect that the old civilian capitalist twelve-room apartments were scarcely more than a symbol – but of this most subtle distinction of all, which is pursued in the form of rank markings, no one can have too much. No one can have so much respect and so much self-respect that they do not want more. On the things that are most ethereal, most evanescent and elusive of all does our unshakable social order rest securely for all time.

  Immersed in such reflections I stood by the metro exit, observing, as in a dream, the guards patrolling to and fro along the barbed-wire-crested district wall. By the time that Linda finally passed through the barrier four trains had arrived, four times the cohorts had streamed up into the daylight. I hurried over to her and we continued side by side.

  We could not talk, of course, because of the air force exercises, which permitted no conversation to be held out of doors either by day or by night. At any rate, she saw my pleased expression and nodded encouragingly, though serious as always. Not until we had entered the building and the lift had taken us down to our apartment did a relative silence enclose us – the rumble of the metro, which shook the walls, was still sufficiently muffled for us to be able to converse unhindered – and yet we were careful to delay all talk until we were inside the apartment. Had anyone heard us talking in the lift, they would quite naturally have suspected that we were discussing matters we did not want the children or the home help to hear. There had been cases where enemies of the state and other criminals tried to use the lift as a conspirators’ den; after all, it was an obvious choice, as for technical reasons police ears and police eyes could not be installed in a lift, and the concierge usually had other things to do than run up and down listening on the landings. So we took care to say nothing until we entered the family room, where that week’s home help had already set the table for dinner and was waiting with the children, whom she had fetched down from the residents’ creche. She seemed to be a nice, orderly girl, and our friendly greeting was prompted by more than our awareness that she, like all home helps, was duty-bound to deliver a report on the family at the end of the week – a reform generally considered to have improved the ambience in many homes. An aura of happiness and well-being reigned around our table, especially as our eldest son Ossu was present among us. He had arrived on a visit from the children’s camp, as it was a home evening.

  ‘I have something pleasant to tell you,’ I said to Linda over the potato soup. ‘My experiment has reached the point where I can start using human material tomorrow, under the supervision of a control chief.’

  ‘Who do you think it will be?’ asked Linda.

  I am certain that I showed no reaction, but inwardly her words made me jump. It could have been a perfectly innocent question. What was more natural than a wife asking her husband who his control chief would be? After all, the length of the testing period depended on how petty-minded or how easygoing the control chief happened to be. There had even been cases where ambitious control chiefs had made the researcher’s discovery their own, and there were relatively few ways to protect oneself from this. Not surprising, then, that one’s nearest and dearest should ask who it was going to be.

  But I listened out for an undertone in her voice. My most immediate chief, and therefore probably my future control chief, was Edo Rissen. And Edo Rissen had previously been employed at the food factory where Linda worked. I knew that they had had a fair amount of contact with each other, and from various small signs I concluded that he had made a certain impression on my wife.

  At her question my jealousy awoke and pricked up its ears. How intimate, really, was the relationship between her and Rissen? In a large factory it could often happen that two people were out of sight of the others, in the storage rooms, for example, where bales and crates blocked the view through the glass walls and where, moreover, no one else was busy at the time ….. Also, I knew for a fact that Linda had often done shifts as a night guard at the factory. Rissen could easily have had his shift at the same time. Anything was possible, even the worst of all: that it was still him she loved, and not me.

  At that time I seldom wondered about myself, about what I thought and felt or what other people thought and felt, unless it had a direct practical significance for me. Only later, during my lonely time as a prisoner, did the moments begin to return as riddles, forcing me to wonder, interpret and reinterpret. Now, so long after the event, I know that when I so eagerly hoped for ‘certainty’ in the question of Linda and Rissen, I did not really want a certainty that there was no relationship between them. I wanted certainty that she had moved away from me. I wanted a certainty that would bring an end to my marriage.