Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘A boomslang is a small green bastard that hangs in the trees all day, Ken. This one was black and it was wriggling along the ground. And the boomslang is haemotoxic, so the blood would have been pouring out of my mouth, my ears and my arse by now. Don’t you remember how we went through all this?’

‘I just want to be completely sure before I give you the injection.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ His father closes his eyes. ‘I just hope you don’t feel these weeks have been a waste of time.’

Ken shakes his head and he means it. Sure, he’s hated every second of the twenty-seven days he’s been here, hated the long hot days trudging round the snake farm behind his father and the grizzled old Black foreman whose parents, in a darkly humorous moment, had named Adolf. Those voices have gone in one ear and out the other, about the green and the black mambos, about the fangs at the front and the back of the mouth, about the ones that can bite even when you’re holding them up by the tail, about which ones are to be fed mice and which ones birds. He doesn’t give a shit about whether cobras come from Egypt or Mozambique, all he knows is that there are a hell of a lot of them, and that his father must have been off his trolley when he bought the farm.

In the evenings they sat on the veranda in front of the house, his father and Adolf both sucking on pipes as they heard the cries of the animals out there, with Adolf describing the legends and beliefs related to each one of them as they announced themselves in this way. When the moon rose and the cold laughter of the hyenas made Ken shiver, Adolf told stories about the Zulus, who believed that snakes were the spirits of the dead and let them come into their houses; and about how the tribes in Zimbabwe would never kill pythons because a long drought was certain to ensue. And when Ken laughed at these superstitions his father talked about certain remote regions of the north of England, places in which people still observed an old ritual involving snakes: if you saw an adder you had to kill it at once, draw a circle round it with a cross inside and then read over it from Psalm 68. And as Ken watched in astonishment his father stood up there on the veranda and declaimed into the pitch-black jungle night:

‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered:

let them also that hate him flee before him.

As smoke is driven away, so drive them away:

as wax melteth before the fire,

so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.’

The bird shrieks again. Perched at the top of the tree the white, long-legged bird with the red comb on its head looks almost like a cockerel.

‘Isn’t it funny how little we know each other, you and I, Ken?’

Ken jumps. It’s as though his father can read his thoughts. His father sighs.

‘I don’t suppose we ever got to know each other really. I... was never really there, was I? It’s a pity when fathers aren’t there.’

The last sentence lingers in the air and seems to demand an answer, but Ken doesn’t have one.

‘Do you hate me, Ken?’

The buzzing of the insects suddenly stops, as though all of them are holding their breath.

‘No.’ Ken holds the point of the needle up and ejects the air until a drop runs down it. ‘Hate’s got nothing to do with it, Father.’

Emerson Abbott had woken at first light, looked at his sleeping wife as though trying to remember who she was, risen and crossed to the open window, looked at the trees in the park whose black branches reached starkly up towards the grey winter skies, at the asphalt far down below that glistened wetly in the light from the lamp posts, swaying in the wind.

Times were hard, people needed comfort, escapism, cheap lies and dreams, and since he sold these cheapest his publishing business was humming along. An American company had made an offer. The business had been in the family for three generations. Emerson Abbott had smiled. He stepped up onto the windowsill, a gust of wind had wrapped the curtain around his foot and almost made him fall. Holding on to the guttering he raised himself to his full, shivering height. The rain drove in from the side, prickling like icy nails against his skin. He opened his mouth. It tasted of ashes. He knew the time had come for the great leap. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again he was divorced from Emma, whose surname was now Ives, which was not her maiden name but the name of her new husband, who had moved in after Emerson moved out because by the terms of the settlement she kept the house. The Americans had taken down the Abbott sign above the publisher’s door. They had decided they would use their own name, and in truth Emerson was happy that the family name was no longer associated with the products that emerged from behind that door. Through a friend he bought a snake farm in Tuli in the west of Botswana. He knew nothing about the business of farming snakes, only that they delivered snakes to reptile parks and to laboratories that produced serums that could prevent humans dying from snake bites, and that it wasn’t particularly profitable.

Three weeks after he had opened his eyes he shut them again as tightly as he could. The sun hung like an oversized reading lamp above the taxi rank outside the international airport in the not quite so international capital of Botswana, a country town the name of which was, his plane ticket told him, Gaborone. He took a taxi to the government offices, and after a week of running up and down the corridors of bureaucracy he left with all the necessary documentation, the licences, the signatures and rubber stamps, and had not since that day been back to Gaborone. And since Gaborone was the only international airport that meant he hadn’t left Botswana either.

Because why should he? As quickly and instinctively as he had hated Gaborone he fell in love with Tuli. The farm consisted of three old but well-maintained brick buildings where the staff of four lived alongside the eight hundred snakes, all of them with bites that were in greater or lesser degree fatal. The buildings were situated on a high plain surrounded by buffalo bushes and mongongo trees on gently sloping hillsides. The place was rarely visited, save by elephants taking the wrong route down to the riverbank, jackals in search of offal or discarded shoes, or the weekly jeep that came to fetch snakes and snake serum and brought in supplies along the almost impassable roads. Across the green-rimmed horizon dead trees pointed spectral black fingers up towards the sky, but apart from that there was nothing here to remind him of London.

When the dry season came, herds of impala gathered on the plains where they could be close to water, along with their regular fellow travellers, the apes. After them came the zebras and the kudu antelopes. The lions hunted day and night — it was party time for the savannah’s predators — and in the brief dusk they could see the sun flare up in the west before it disappeared, and later on hear the deep growl of the lions rolling through the night as moths swarmed around the outside lamps like snowflakes in a blizzard.

Only once had he doubted that here was where he belonged, and that was when a Naja nigricollis, a black-necked spitting cobra, gave birth to her young and he saw the father start to eat them alive, one after another, before they managed to get him out of the cage. Adolf had told him that small snakes were a natural part of the cobra’s diet — but its own young? It excited a disgust in him, a distaste for the nature of the creature that left him for a time wondering whether or not he could face carrying on. But then one evening Adolf showed him a dead tiger snake, bitten to death by its own young, and explained to him that the way of nature did not recognise ties of kinship, that it was always and everywhere a case of eat or be eaten. That it wasn’t evil or immoral to eat one’s own offspring or one’s parents — on the contrary it was simply living out nature’s imperative, and that was what Africa was about: survival, survival at any price. And in due course Emerson Abbott was able to accept this and even admire it as part of the pitiless system of things, the remorseless logic that kept nature in balance and gave the animals and the humans their right to live. And gradually he rediscovered what he had been missing for so long: the fear of dying. Or more accurately: of not being alive.