The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

There was a small plastic boat that belonged to the cabin, and on my visits, we would fish on the lake. Mostly pike and perch. We rowed around, exploring the lake, which was larger than it initially appeared. The cabin was located on the east side, and at the southern end was a large, shallow patch of reeds, where you could hear pike splashing about at dusk. A small stream emptied into the lake at its northern end; the perch hunted there around the clock. In the west, the lake stretched into a long, narrow arm chock-full of reeds, water lilies, and small, grassy islets. We figured that was where the biggest pike lived.

One night, we were sitting in the cabin, gazing out across the water. The lake had flooded and climbed several yards up the lawn, and suddenly big, powerful tail fins broke the surface, right at the edge of the grass. They swayed this way and that like dark pennants in the moonlight. They were tench, we decided eventually, and we fished for them the way we used to fish for eel: ledgering with hazel rods with bells on their tips. I caught one that weighed almost three and half pounds; it was dark and slimy and had tiny, almost invisible scales. We caught bream, too, sluggish, clumsy fish that somewhat resignedly let themselves be pulled out of the water.

But we never caught a single eel, which as time wore on seemed more and more mysterious.

“There must be eels here,” Dad would say. All the signs indicated as much. The lake was shallow and the lake bed muddy; there was plenty of vegetation and rocks to hide among, and the water was teeming with small fish. The stream that emptied into the lake would present no challenge to a migrating eel, and it was connected to the stream we had always fished for eel in, which was only about twenty miles away.

“I don’t understand why we never catch any,” Dad would say. “There just have to be eels here.”

And yet we never so much as glimpsed a single one. As if to remind us of what it had once meant to us, it hid in the shadows. Eventually, we started wondering if it existed at all.

DAD FELL ILL IN EARLY SUMMER THE YEAR HE TURNED FIFTY-SIX. THAT something was wrong had been known for a long time. He’d been in pain and had eventually gone to see a doctor, who had in turn referred him to the hospital. They had done X-rays and tests and eventually determined what the problem was: a large, aggressive tumor. Why dad was sick was explained by a doctor who told us about the clear correlation between working with asphalt and the kind of cancer he had. The warm steam from the asphalt had eventually penetrated to the depth of his very core, and there was now literally no way of ever getting it out.

He had surgery as summer turned to autumn; it was a big, complicated surgery, and we were well into winter before he could leave the hospital. For months he lay in bed attached to an IV, unable to eat or even enjoy his snus, and we would come to visit and watch in silence when the staff made him get out of bed and walk up and down the hallway, leaning over a walker. He was pale and thin under his hospital gown. It was the first time I’d seen him really weak.

It was also there, one day in the hospital cafeteria, while Dad was in his room, drowsy from the morphine he’d been given, that my mom told me what I should have understood much earlier. My grandfather, the person I had always called Grandad, wasn’t my father’s father. His biological father was someone else entirely, someone none of us knew, not even Dad. My grandmother had met that man when she was about twenty. She had become pregnant and had a child, and the man had wanted nothing to do with her or his son. That was all we knew about him, aside from his first name, which was also my father’s middle name.

Why hadn’t I realized sooner? How could I have missed that? I knew Dad had spent his first years living with Nana’s parents. I knew he’d been looked after by Nana’s sisters when she was at work at the rubber factory in town. I’d heard about when my great-grandmother died, when Dad was just a couple of years old, and when they moved from the contract worker’s cottage to their own house. For some reason, I just hadn’t put two and two together.

Nana hadn’t met the person I would eventually call Grandad until my dad was about seven. They’d been an item for only a short while when Dad had come home inconsolable after his first day of school. All the children in his new class had been asked to tell the others who their fathers were. But Dad didn’t know. He hadn’t been able to say anything, and maybe he’d realized for the first time that our origin is something that affects us, whether we want it to or not, and that a person who doesn’t know his origin will always be a little bit lost. If you don’t know where you came from, you can’t know where you’re going. The journey away from home and back to it follow the same given route.

Soon after that first day of school, my grandparents got engaged. They were married just a few weeks later, quickly and without fuss, with Nana’s sisters as the only witnesses.

Grandad, the person I would continue to call Grandad, had from the outset treated Dad like his own son, and it seems Dad made a decision then and there. His origin was a riddle he would choose the answer to. He’d spent his first seven years without a father, and now he suddenly had one. The invisible figure who had passively