I visit her, she stretches her bandaged arm toward me, has cut open her wrist with a knife; cut open her wrists with a knife, to saw into your own flesh, through the skin, sinews, veins. (Now they were walking along a picket fence in an area with lots of gardens, Paul opened a garden door, they went to the cottage on a crunching path, way up above them behind naked bushes and trees the dark massif of a church held court; Paul opened up, raw air hit them; Paul lit the petroleum lamp on the writing table, emptied the wood stove, lit a fire with newspaper and kindling wood.) But still suicide is probably the easiest way to die, if you’ve reached that point then there’s probably just desire, desire in the face of death, you have to love death in order to kill yourself, you do it like you’re in a trance, in a spiritual state; but it must be horrible, completely incomprehensible, to be sentenced to death, to have your head chopped off. Sometimes I dream that, imagine the path to the gallows, your hands tied behind your back, you’re led up there, laid down, your head on the block, and the axe is supposed to chop off your head, your head is supposed to lie down there in the basket all on its own. With your mouth, your eyes, your brain; have you ever considered that people actually go through this, that they have to let themselves be led there, to the axe, the gallows, the electric chair, the wall; try to imagine this path, you can’t, you just bellow. These pictures, the death cell, polished clean, a transformer center, everything sober, scientific, the sharp-edged cold chair with the straps, the straps around your torso, around your arms, around your feet; or a couple of Chinese on the street, they’re supposed to be publicly decapitated by a sword, the head of one of them has already been separated from the rest of his body, the blood spurts out of his neck, his body is still upright on his knees, the body itself is still alive and presumably the head is still alive for a fraction of a second as it flies through the air; the other guy looks at it, completely frozen by fear; the executioner is still rotating from the power of his sword stroke; and at the edge of the street stands the audience, people who happened to be walking by, round expressionless Chinese faces, men, women, children, behind them a store with paper lanterns, small carved dragons and pagodas. Another pictureI remember it from my childhoodduring the First World War the English tied rebels in India to the mouths of their cannons. The text underneath it explains that the natives believed that the soul of the victim was destroyed by this kind of execution. The total extermination. Or the picture of a colonial soldier who got a spear in the back during the last war. He sits on a wagon, you can see from the look on his face that he doesn’t dare to breathe; just imagine sitting in a wagon with a spear sticking in you, the cart rattles along, the barb somewhere in your lungs, you’re being transported through a landscape covered with sand and cacti. To be done with all this once and for all, just to be able to work in peace and quiet. Would love to have a room like this, just for myself. Or a hut in the woods. As long as I stay in this city, I’m just stumbling around. I’ve got to get out of here.
Translated into English from original Swedish manuscript by Peter Stenberg and Lena Karlström.