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

occupied that role until then didn’t interest him in the slightest, and the reason he’d never told us the truth was that he didn’t want us to feel any doubt about the way things were. Our grandad was the kind, decent man who, unlike the invisible man, had actually been there. At some point, Dad had simply decided that his, and consequently our, origin was there with him, on the farm by the stream, and that was the truth, in every way that mattered. Not even now, when he was sick and nothing was certain, did Dad talk about it, and we never asked him.

The surgery, and the almost six months of bed rest, gave Dad four more years. Four years of slow recovery before the tumors would come back, each time more brutal. First a relapse and another autumn of surgeries, complications, pain, and several months in the hospital. Then a second relapse; by then, he was so weakened there was no point in fighting.

Dad had turned sixty by then. I was sitting with him at the house, watching TV, one early evening. He was relaxing in the black armchair and had put his feet up on a stool in front of him; he was tired but in a good mood. We didn’t know then that the tumor had come back; we didn’t know anything about what was once again lurking inside his body. At least I didn’t.

“Are the water levels still high out by the cabin?” he asked.

“No, the water’s subsiding, it only just about covers the jetty now.”

“But the jetty’s still there, right? It didn’t move?”

“No, it looks fine, we did a good job securing it. It’s going to take something big to shift it now.”

“Sure, but how many times have we said that?”

He turned his head and looked at me. “So, have you been doing any fishing?” he asked, and that’s when I realized his eyes looked different. The whites had gone yellow, had acquired a grayish-yellow tone, like an old sheet of paper that had turned dirty and matte; the yellow surrounded his black pupils like a thick fog. I looked him in the eyes for a split second, and I must have reacted somehow, because he looked away and turned back to the TV; I sat next to him in silence, staring straight ahead, without really knowing what had just happened.

We talked some more, but each time I looked at him it was as if he were trying to avoid my gaze. He turned his head away, as though hiding something from me, and I remembered a time when I was little and we were sitting around the kitchen table. It was in the middle of winter and snowy and cold outside; Dad was wearing a yellow knit hat with a blue crown on it, and when he took it off the skin of his forehead was the same shade of yellow as the hat. “I’ve got jaundice,” he said and chuckled, but I didn’t understand it was a joke. I asked Mum what jaundice was and she said it was a disease of the liver and that it could be fatal and I went scared and quiet. I thought Dad was dying, and I had no words to express my fear. When he laughed and explained he was kidding and it was just the hat rubbing off on him, I didn’t dare to believe it. I had realized that if other people could fall ill and even die, then why not my dad? Why not me?

As we watched the television, darkness fell outside and Dad grew tired, but I could feel him fighting it. He wanted to stay up a while longer. He didn’t want to acknowledge the fatigue that had taken over his body, or admit something was wrong. So he sat there, listening and talking, in a low, soft voice, and suddenly, almost in the middle of a sentence, he closed his eyes and fell asleep. He sat there in his reclining chair, completely still with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and heavily, as though he’d just clocked out. I sat alone in the chair next to him; eventually, I turned back to the TV and waited, without really knowing what I was waiting for.

A short while later—ten seconds, twenty seconds—he opened his eyes again, looked at me, and tried to smile. “I must’ve drifted off,” he said.

A few weeks later, I visited him in the hospital; it was two days after midsummer, and nothing was hidden anymore. It’s back, the doctor had explained; this time, the tumor was attacking the liver. When we asked what could be done, the young, serious doctor spread his hands and shook his head.

I think Dad understood it better than I did. “I’m not going to make it this time,” he said; I tried to argue but couldn’t find the words. “I hope you’ll want to keep the cabin,” he said—at least I could promise him that. A few days later, he was transferred to hospice and sank into unconsciousness.

THE THIRD OF JULY WAS A THURSDAY. THE WEATHER WAS WARM AND stifling. We were sitting in Dad’s small room at the hospice with the patio door open onto a plot of grass. Beyond the lawn, behind some trees, there was a small pond, where a heron stood, turning its head this way and that, peering out across the still surface.

It had been a difficult night. Dad had made a lot of noise, whimpering and groaning as though he were worried and in pain, even in his unconscious state. Mom, who spent her nights on a cot in his room, had barely slept a wink.

That morning, when I arrived, he was calmer; I sat alone by his bedside, holding his hand. It was warm and damp; his rough fingers were stiff like bits of wood. He was quiet and completely still. I listened to his breathing, faint and irregular; between each breath, the seconds stretched out