The Swedish Sailor: And Other Stories

By Helder Diniz

The Swedish Sailor and other stories is about the search for friendship and acceptance by lonely boys deprived of the warmth and affection they had hoped to find at home and never did.
Named Ingmar, Valerio, Armindo or Daniel, living in Sweden, West Berlin, Portugal or East Africa, their search is basically the same, and the friendship and acceptance they manage to find in the end proves sometimes to be more short-lived than they hoped.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491884201

Helder Diniz

Helder Diniz was born and raised in East Africa, studied in Mozambique, Portugal, Germany, Denmark and Sweden and worked as military interpreter, journalist and translator both in Africa and in Europe before retiring in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg where he currently lives. Can be contacted at [e-mail]

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© 2013 Helder Diniz. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 11/12/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8419-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8420-1 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Swedish Sailor

Rags

Pebbles

The White Raven

The Boy Who Never Was

The Red Carpet

The Crutch

The Maltese Cat

The Sapajous’ Den

The Swedish Sailor

To the Swedish sailor

who would not let me hide on his boat

shortly before it left my hometown

on its way back to Scandinavia

Thank you for being there

and having stopped me from going in

as we would never have met otherwise

or known each other as we did

God bless you for the golden bracelet you gave me that day,

thanks to which I never went hungry after running away from home

and made it possible for me

to have my old teddy bear mended

in the country where you were born

and where I was trying to run away to

From both of us

a big hug of friendship

and gratitude

As a professional photographer in the little harbour town where we lived in the north of Mozambique, my stepfather was often invited by the local Harbour Master to attend the cocktail parties given by the captains of the big cargo ships which called at our port coming from Mombasa, Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam to load copra, sisal and tea before returning to Norway or Sweden where most of them came from.

Although I was only fourteen at the time, my passion for foreign travel, world flags and geography was well known to my teachers who, unlike my stepfather, always praised me for the high marks I usually had on the subject.

Having often seen groups of drunken sailors tottering along the promenade leading to the wharf, I asked him one day who were those laughing and singing young men holding one another not to trip and fall, as they did not speak our language and looked very white and blond unlike most people in our town.

‘Swedish sailors,’ my stepfather replied dryly. ‘They’re always drunk,’ he added with disgust. ‘That’s all they do when they come ashore—drink like fish and puke like pigs on our streets. Many people have already complained to the Harbour Master about their disgraceful behaviour but he has done nothing about it, maybe because he’s always invited to the parties the captains give on board where they offer him the best they have in Scandinavia, or whatever they call the shitty pigsty where they all had the bad taste to be born!’

I asked him if he had ever been there to be so sure that the place was as bad as he claimed, to which he replied in a nasty growl that he had no wish to do so because if the seamen who polluted our town were a sample of their own people, then he could well imagine what the others were like.

Instead of keeping my mouth shut as I should have done, I objected, unwisely, that nobody can choose the place where they are born and that I had never seen a sailor, drunk or otherwise, molest anybody in the streets, a remark which deeply irritated the Old Goat as I had always secretly called my stepfather.

Looking sideways at me he said with contempt that I still had a lot to learn, not in the shitty school where I was wasting my time and his money but in the only real school that existed in the world, in other words, as he put it, the School of Life.

‘Besides,’ he added, ‘if you don’t believe me and are as interested as you seem to be, I suggest you go there and find out for yourself. No doubt you’d love getting drunk with those queers because that’s what they are—a bunch of drunken queers like you!’ he said, flaring his nostrils and giving me an almighty wallop on the neck before leaving, cursing and slamming the door like an ill-bred boor, as he always did every time he himself had had too much to drink, which often happened.

I remember standing there for quite a while that afternoon, leaning against the parapet of our veranda overlooking the promenade, my neck smarting an d my ears burning with shame due to the latest string of insults hurled at me by the beast I had been entrusted to after my mother’s demise.

And that was when I decided to run away and never go back home again—run away to shitty Scandinavia, as the Old Goat had called the place where the sailors came from.

Not because I had any wish to get drunk or mess about with boys as most of my comrades did on the sly at school, but only because the Old Goat apparently disliked the Swedes and had no intention of visiting the shitty pigsty where, according to him, they all had the bad taste to be born.

If he dislikes the Swedes and Scandinavia, then the people are bound to be kind and the place must be nice, I said to myself, heading for the small room where I slept, looking for a plastic bag where I could put what I was planning to take with me.

As the only bag I found was not so big as I had hoped, I put in it just my toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, a comb, a pair of scissors, two pairs of socks and underpants, two T-shirts partly torn and full of holes, two pairs of shorts and a pair of sandals which I had not yet used because they looked beautiful and I did not want to ruin them—the only present I had been given at Christmas by a gentle neighbour of ours, who sometimes also gave me bars of chocolate when my stepfather was not looking.

Looking at my old teddy-bear, now colourless, wobbly and without fluff, with two buttons replacing the eyes which had fallen off, I could not repress the tears that came to my eyes. ‘I can’t take you with me, "Bo",’ I said then, holding him against my chest. ‘There’s no room in the bag.’

The thought of what the Old Goat might do to it when he realized that I had run away from home, however, made me change my mind and with great difficulty I managed in the end to push old Ted as far down as possible, where the poor thing sat with its head wobbling out of the bag.

‘I’ll have your head fixed as soon as we get to Sweden,’ I assured him in a hurry. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be out of here and life will be better than it is now. We shall always be together, and that’s a promise, so don’t worry about anything—we’ll be alright.’

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