Italian Shoes
Page 2
Fifteen years ago there were about fifty permanent residents out here in the archipelago. There was a boat ferrying four youngsters to and from the village school. This year there are only seven of us left, and only one is under the age of sixty. That’s Jansson. As the youngest, he is dependent on the rest of us keeping going, and insisting on living out here on the remote islands. Otherwise there’ll be no job for him.
But that’s irrelevant to me. I don’t like Jansson. He’s one of the most difficult patients I’ve ever had. He belongs to a group of extremely recalcitrant hypochondriacs. On one occasion a few years ago, when I’d examined his throat and checked his blood pressure, he suddenly said he thought he had a brain tumour that was affecting his eyesight. I said I didn’t have time to listen to his imaginings. But he insisted. Something was happening inside his brain. I asked him why he thought that. Did he have headaches? Did he have dizzy spells? Any other symptoms? He didn’t give up until I’d dragged him into the boathouse, where it was darker, and shone my special torch into his pupils, and told him that everything seemed to be normal.
I’m convinced that Jansson is basically as sound as a bell. His father is ninety-seven and lives in a care home, but his mind is clear. Jansson and his father fell out in 1970, and then Jansson stopped helping his father to fish for eels and went to work at a sawmill in Småland instead. I’ve never understood why he chose a sawmill. Naturally, I can understand his failing to put up with his tyrannical father any longer. But a sawmill? I really have no idea. However, since that trouble in 1970, they’ve not spoken to each other. Jansson didn’t return from Småland until his father was so old that he’d been taken into a home.
Jansson has an older sister called Linnea who lives on the mainland. She was married and used to run a cafe in the summer – but then her husband died. He collapsed on the hill down to the Co-op, whereupon she closed the cafe and found Jesus. She acts as messenger between father and son.
Jansson’s mother died many years ago. I met her once. She was already on her way into the shadows of senility, and was convinced I was her father, who had died in the 1920s. It was a horrible experience.
I wouldn’t have reacted so strongly now, but I was different in those days.
I don’t really know anything more about Jansson, apart from the fact that his first name is Ture and he’s a postman. I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me. But whenever he sails round the headland, I’m generally standing on the jetty, waiting for him. I stand there wondering why, but I know I’ll never get an answer.
It’s like waiting for God, or for Godot; but instead, it’s Jansson who comes.
I sit down at the kitchen table and open the logbook I’ve been keeping for the past twelve years. I have nothing to say, and there’s nobody who might one day be interested in anything I write. But I write even so. Every day, all the year round, just a few lines. About the weather, the number of birds in the trees outside my window, my health. Nothing else. If I want, I can look up a particular date ten years ago and establish that there was a blue tit or an oystercatcher on the jetty when I went down there to wait for Jansson.
I keep a diary of a life that has lost its way.
The morning had passed.
It was time to pull my fur hat down over my ears, venture out into the bitter cold, stand on the jetty and wait for the arrival of Jansson. He must be frozen stiff in his hydrocopter when the weather’s as cold as this. I sometimes think I can detect a whiff of strong drink when he clambers on to the jetty. I don’t blame him.
When I stood up from the kitchen table, the animals came to life. The cat was the first to the door, the dog a long way behind. I let them out, put on an old, moth-eaten fur coat that belonged to my grand father, wrapped a scarf round my neck and reached for the thick fur hat with earflaps that dated back to military service during the Second World War. Then I set off for the jetty. It really was extremely cold. There was still not a sound to be heard. No birds, not even Jansson’s hydrocopter.
I could just picture him. He always looked as if he were driving an old-fashioned tram in the days when the driver had to stand outside at the mercy of the elements. His winter clothes were almost beyond description. Coats, overcoats, the ragged remains of a fur coat, even an old dressing gown, layer upon layer, on days as cold as this. I would ask him why he didn’t buy one of those special winter overalls I’d seen in a shop on the mainland. He’d say he didn’t trust them. The real reason was that he was too mean. He wore a fur hat similar to mine. His face was covered by a balaclava that made him look like a bank robber, and he wore an old pair of motorcycle goggles.
I often asked him if it wasn’t the Post Office’s responsibility to equip him with warm winter clothing. He mumbled something incomprehensible. Jansson wanted as little to do with the Post Office as possible, despite the fact that they were his employers.
There was a seagull frozen into the ice next to the jetty. Its wings were folded, its stiff legs sticking up straight out of the ice. Its eyes were like two glittering crystals. I released it and laid it on a stone on the shore. As I did so, I heard the sound of the hydrocopter’s engine. I didn’t need to check my watch, Jansson was on time. His previous stop would have been at Vesselsö. An old lady by the name of Asta Karolina Åkerblom lives there. She is eighty-eight years of age, has severe pains in her arms, but stubbornly refuses to move away from the island on which she was born. Jansson tells me her eyesight is poor, but even so she still knits jumpers and socks for her many grandchildren scattered all over the country. I wondered what the jumpers looked like. Is it really possible to knit and follow various patterns if one is half blind?
The hydrocopter came into view as it rounded the headland reaching out towards Lindsholmen. It is a remarkable sight as the insect-like vessel approaches and you can make out the muffled-up man at the wheel. Jansson switched off the engine, the big propeller fell silent, and he glided in towards the jetty, pulling off his goggles and balaclava. His face was red and sweaty.
‘I’ve got toothache,’ he said as he hauled himself up on to the jetty with considerable difficulty.
‘What am I supposed to do about that?’
‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not a dentist.’
‘The pain is down here to the left.’
Jansson opened his mouth wide, as if he’d just caught sight of something horrific behind my back. My own teeth are in relatively good shape. I don’t normally need to visit the dentist more than once a year.
‘I can’t do anything. You need to see a dentist.’
‘You could take a look at least.’
Jansson was not going to give up. I went into the boathouse and fetched a torch and a spatula.
‘Open your mouth!’
‘It is open.’
‘Open wider.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I can’t see a thing. Turn your face this way!’
I shone the torch into Jansson’s mouth, and poked his tongue out of the way. His teeth were yellow and covered in tartar. He had a lot of fillings. But his gums seemed healthy, and I couldn’t see any holes.
‘I can’t see anything wrong.’
‘But it hurts.’
‘You’ll have to go to a dentist. Take a painkiller!’
‘I’ve run out.’
I produced a pack of painkillers from my medicine chest. He put it in his pocket. As usual, it never occurred to him to ask what he owed me. Neither for the consultation nor the painkillers. He takes my generosity for granted. That’s probably why I dislike him. It’s not easy when your closest friend is somebody you dislike.
‘I’ve got a parcel for you. It’s a present from the Post Office.’
‘Since when have they started giving away presents?’
‘It’s a Christmas present. Everybody’s getting a parcel from the Post Office.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘It’s free. Throw it away if you don’t want it.’
‘You’re not going to convince me that anybody gets anything free from the Post Office.’
‘I’m not trying to convince you of anything at all. Everybody gets the same parcel. And it’s free.’
Jansson’s intractability sometimes gets the better of me. I didn’t have the strength to stand in the bitter cold and argue with him. I ripped open the parcel. It contained two reflectors and a message: Be careful on the roads! Christmas greetings from the Post Office.
‘What the hell do I need reflectors for? There are no cars here, and I’m the only pedestrian.’
‘One of these days you might get fed up with living out here. Then you might find a couple of reflectors useful. Can you give me a glass of water? I need to take a tablet.’
I have never allowed Jansson to set foot in my house, and I had no intention of doing so now.
‘I’ll give you a mug and you can melt some snow by placing it next to the engine.’
I went back into the boathouse and found the cap of an old Thermos flask that doubled as a mug, filled it with snow and handed it over. Jansson added one of his tablets. While the snow melted next to the hot engine, we stood and waited in silence. He emptied the mug.
‘I’ll be back on Friday. Then it’s the Christmas holidays.’
‘I know.’
‘How are you going to celebrate Christmas?’
‘I’m not going to celebrate Christmas.’
Jansson gestured towards my red house. I was afraid that all the clothes he was wearing might make him fall over, like a defeated knight wearing armour that was far too heavy for him.
‘You ought to hang some fairy lights around your house. It would liven things up.’
‘No thank you. I prefer it to be dark.’
‘Why can’t you make your surroundings a bit more pleasant?’
‘This is exactly how I want it.’
I turned my back on him and started walking up the slope towards the house. I threw the reflectors into the snow. As I reached the woodshed, I heard the roar as the hydrocopter engine sprang into life. It sounded like an animal in extreme pain. The dog was sitting on the steps, waiting for me. He could think himself lucky that he’s deaf. The cat was lurking around the apple tree, eyeing the waxwings pecking at the bacon rind I’d hung up.
I sometimes miss not having anybody to talk to. Banter with Jansson can’t really be called conversation. Just gossip. Local gossip. He goes on about things I have no interest in. He asks me to diagnose his imagined illnesses. My jetty and boathouse have become a sort of private clinic for just him. Over the years I have transferred into the boathouse – in among the old fishing nets and other equipment – blood pressure cuffs and instruments for removing earwax. My stethoscope hangs from a wooden hook together with a decoy eider my grandfather made a very long time ago. I have a special drawer in which I keep medicines that Jansson might well need. The bench on the jetty, where my grandfather used to sit and smoke his pipe after gutting the flounders he’d caught, is now used as an examination couch when Jansson needs to lie down. As blizzards raged, I have kneaded his abdomen when he suspected he had stomach cancer, and I have examined his legs when he was convinced he was suffering from some insidious muscle problem. I have often thought about the fact that my hands, once used in complicated operations, are now used exclusively to frisk Jansson’s enviably healthy body.
But conversation? No.
Every day I examine my own boat which has been beached. It’s now three years since I took it out of the water in order to make it seaworthy again. But I never got round to it. It’s a splendid old clinker-built wooden boat that is now being destroyed by a combination of weather and neglect. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen. This spring I shall get down to sorting it out.
But I wonder if I really will.
I went back indoors and returned to my jigsaw puzzle. The theme is one of Rembrandt’s paintings, Night Watch. I won it a long time ago in a raffle organised by the hospital in Luleå in the far north of Sweden, where I was a newly appointed surgeon who concealed his insecurity behind a large dose of self-satisfaction. As the painting is dark, the puzzle is very difficult to solve; I only managed to place one single piece today. I prepared the evening meal and listened to the radio as I ate. The thermometer was now showing minus twenty-one degrees. The sky was cloudless, and the forecast was that it would become even colder before dawn. It looked as if records for low temperatures were about to be broken. Had it ever been as cold as this here? During one of the war years, perhaps? I decided to ask Jansson about that – he usually knows about such things.
Something was nagging at me.
I tried lying down on the bed and reading. A book about how the potato came to Sweden. I had read it several times before. Presumably because it didn’t raise any questions. I could turn page after page and know that I wasn’t going to be faced with something unpleasant and unexpected. I switched off the light at midnight. My two animals had already gone to sleep. The wooden walls crackled and creaked.
I tried to come to a decision. Should I continue to man the defences of my island fortress? Or should I accept defeat, and try to make something of the life that was left to me?
I could not decide. I stared out into the darkness, and suspected that my life would continue as it had done hitherto. There would be no significant change.
It was the winter solstice. The longest night and the shortest day. Looking back, it would become clear to me that it had a significance I had never suspected.
It had been an ordinary day. It had been very cold, and in the snow around my frozen-in jetty were a couple of reflectors from the Post Office, and a dead seagull.
CHAPTER 3
CHRISTMAS CAME AND went. New Year came and went.
On 3 January a snowstorm blew in over the archipelago from the Gulf of Finland. I stood on the hill behind my house, watching the black clouds piling up on the horizon. Almost two feet of snow fell in eleven hours, and I was obliged to climb out of the kitchen window in order to shovel snow away from the front door.
When the snowstorm drifted away, I noted in my logbook: ‘Waxwings vanished. The bacon rind deserted. Minus six degrees Celsius.’
Fifty-eight letters and three full stops. Why did I do it?
It was time for me to open up the hole in the ice and take a dip. The wind cut into my body as I trudged down to the jetty. I hacked away the thin covering of ice and stepped into the water. The cold felt like burning.
Just as I had clambered out and was about to return to the house, the wind fell momentarily. Something made me feel afraid and I held my breath. I turned round.
There was somebody standing out on the ice.
A black figure, a silhouette, outlined against all the white. The sun was only just over the horizon. I squinted in the glare, and tried to make out who it was. It was a woman. It looked as if she was leaning on a bicycle. Then I saw that it was in fact a wheeled walker, a Zimmer frame with wheels. I was shuddering with cold. Whoever it was, I couldn’t just stand here by my hole in the ice, naked. I hurried up to the house, and wondered if I’d had a vision.
I dressed and walked up the hill with my binoculars.
I hadn’t been imagining things.
The woman was still there. Her hands were resting on the handles of the walker. She had a handbag over one arm, and had wrapped a scarf round her fur hat, which was pulled down over her forehead. I had difficulty in making out her face through the binoculars. Where had she come from? Who was she?
I tried to think. Unless she was lost, it must be me she’d come to visit. There is nobody else here but me.
I hoped she had lost her way. I didn’t want any visitors.
She was still standing there motionless, her hands on th
e walker’s handles. I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. There was something familiar about that woman out there on the ice.
How had she managed to make her way over here, through a snowstorm, pushing a Zimmer frame? It was three nautical miles to the mainland. It seemed incredible that she could have walked that far without freezing to death.
I stood watching her through the binoculars for over ten minutes. Just as I was about to put them away, she slowly turned her head and looked in my direction.
It was one of those moments in life when time doesn’t merely stand still, it ceases to exist.
The binoculars brought her closer towards me, and I saw that it was Harriet.
Although it was in spring almost forty years ago that I last saw her, I knew it was her. Harriet Hörnfeldt, whom I had loved more than any other woman.
I had been a doctor for a few years, to my waiter father’s endless surprise and my mother’s almost fanatical pride. I had managed to break out of poverty. I was living in Stockholm then, the spring of 1966 was outstandingly beautiful and the city seemed to be bubbling over with life. Something was happening, my generation had burst through the floodgates, torn open the doors of society and demanded change. Harriet and I used to walk through Stockholm as dusk fell.
Harriet was a few years older than I was, and had never had any ambition to continue her studies. She worked as an assistant in a shoe shop. She said she loved me, and I said I loved her, and every time I went home with her to her little bedsit in Hornsgatan, we made love on a sofa bed that constantly threatened to fall to pieces.