Italian Shoes

by Henning Mankell

  Our love was like a raging fire, it would be fair to say. And yet I let her down. I had been given a scholarship by the Karolinska Institute to do postgraduate work in the USA. On 23 May I would be leaving for Arkansas, and would be away for a year. Or at least, that’s what I told Harriet. In fact, the flight was due to leave for New York via Amsterdam on the 22nd.

  I didn’t even say goodbye to her. I simply disappeared.

  During my year in the USA I made no attempt to contact her. I knew nothing about her life, nor did I want to know. I sometimes woke up out of dreams in which she committed suicide. I had a guilty conscience, but always managed to silence it.

  She gradually faded away from my consciousness.

  I returned to Sweden and started work at a hospital in the north, in Luleå. Other women entered my life. Sometimes, especially when I was on my own and had drunk too much, I would wonder what had become of her. Then I would call directory enquiries and ask about Harriet Kristina Hörnfeldt. But I always hung up before the operator had tracked her down. I didn’t dare to meet Harriet again. I didn’t dare to discover what had happened.

  Now she was standing out there on the ice, with a wheeled walker.

  It was exactly thirty-seven years since I had vanished without explanation. I was sixty-six years old. Which meant she must be sixty-nine, going on seventy. I wanted to run into the house and slam the door shut behind me. And then, when I eventually stepped outside again, she would have gone. She would no longer exist. Whatever it was she wanted, she would have been a mirage. I would have simply not seen her standing out there on the ice.

  Minutes passed.

  My heart was racing. The bacon rind hanging in the tree outside the window was still deserted. The birds had not yet returned after the storm.

  When I raised my binoculars again, I saw that she was lying on her back, her arms outstretched. I dropped the binoculars and rushed down to the ice, falling over several times in the deep snow, to where she lay. I checked that her heart was beating, and when I leaned over close to her face, I could just about feel her breathing.

  I wouldn’t have the strength to carry her to the house. I fetched the wheelbarrow from behind the boathouse. I was drenched in sweat by the time I had eased her into the barrow. She hadn’t been as heavy as that in the days when we were close. Or was it me who no longer had the strength? Harriet lay doubled up in the wheelbarrow, a grotesque figure who had not yet opened her eyes.

  When I came to the shore, the wheelbarrow became stuck. I briefly considered pulling her up to the house with the aid of a rope, but I rejected the idea – too undignified. I fetched a spade from the boathouse and cleared the snow from the path. Sweat was dripping off me. All the time I kept checking on Harriet. She was still unconscious. I felt her pulse again. It was fast. I shovelled away for all I was worth.

  I eventually succeeded in getting her to the house. The cat was sitting on the bench under the window, and had been watching the whole process. I placed some planks over the steps up to the door, opened it, then ran with the barrow as fast as I could. At the third attempt, I managed to get Harriet and the wheelbarrow into the hall. The dog was lying under the kitchen table, watching. I chased him out, closed the door and lifted Harriet on to the kitchen sofa. I was so sweaty and out of breath that I was forced to sit down and rest before beginning to examine her.

  I took her blood pressure. It was low, but not worryingly so. I removed her shoes and felt her feet. They were cold, but not frozen. Nor did her lips suggest that she was dehydrated. Her pulse fell slowly until it was 66 beats per minute.

  I was just going to place a cushion under her head when she opened her eyes.

  ‘Your breath smells something awful,’ she said.

  Those were her first words after all those years. I had found her on the ice, struggled like crazy to get her into my house, and the first thing she said was that I had bad breath. My immediate impulse was to throw her out again. I hadn’t invited her, I didn’t know what she wanted, but I could feel my guilt rising to the surface. Had she come to call me to account?

  I didn’t know. But what other reason could there be?

  I realised that I was afraid. It was as if I’d been caught in a trap.

  CHAPTER 4

  HARRIET LOOKED SLOWLY round the room.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘In my kitchen. I saw you out there on the ice. You’d fallen over. I brought you in here. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. But I’m tired.’

  ‘Would you like some water?’

  She nodded. I fetched a glass. She shook her head when I made to help, and sat up of her own accord. I observed her face and decided that she hadn’t really changed all that much. She had grown older, but not different.

  ‘I must have fainted.’

  ‘Are you in pain? Do you often faint?’

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘What does your doctor say about that?’

  ‘The doctor doesn’t say anything, because I haven’t asked him.’

  ‘Your blood pressure’s normal.’

  ‘I’ve never had problems with my blood pressure.’

  She watched a crow clinging on to the bacon rind outside the window. Then she looked at me, her eyes clear and bright.

  ‘I’d be telling a lie if I said I was sorry to disturb you.’

  ‘You’re not disturbing me.’

  ‘Of course I am. I’ve simply turned up here unannounced. But that doesn’t bother me.’

  She sat more upright. I could see that she was in fact in pain.

  ‘How did you get here?’ I asked.

  ‘Why don’t you ask how I found you? I knew about this island, where you spent your summers, and I knew it was off the east coast. It wasn’t easy to track you down, but I managed it in the end. I phoned the Post Office, because I realised they must know where somebody called Fredrik Welin lived.’

  I began to remember something. Early in the morning I’d dreamed about an earthquake. I’d been surrounded by extremely loud noise, but suddenly everything was silent again. The noise hadn’t woken me up, but I’d opened my eyes when silence returned. I must have been awake for a couple of minutes, listening for sounds outside in the darkness.

  Everything had been as normal. And I went back to sleep.

  I now realised that the noise I’d heard in my dream had been Jansson’s hydrocopter. He was the one who had brought her here, and left her on the ice.

  ‘I wanted to arrive early. It was like travelling in an infernal machine. He was very nice. But expensive.’

  ‘What did he charge you?’

  ‘Three hundred for me and two hundred for the walker.’

  ‘But that’s scandalous!’

  ‘Is there anybody else out here with a hydrocopter?’

  ‘I’ll see to it that you get half of that back.’

  She pointed at her glass.

  I refilled it with water. The crow had flown away from the bacon rind. I stood up and said I would go and fetch her walker. There were large pools of water all over the floor from my boots. The dog appeared from somewhere behind the house, and accompanied me down to the shore.

  I tried to think clearly.

  After close to forty years, Harriet had reappeared from the past. The protective wall I’d erected out here on the island had proved to be inadequate. It had been breached by a Trojan Horse in the form of Jansson’s hydrocopter. He had rammed his way through the wall – and charged a lot of money for doing so.

  I walked out on to the ice.

  A north-easterly breeze was blowing. A flight of birds could just be made out in the far distance. The rocks and skerries were all white. It was one of those days characterised by the mysterious stillness one experiences only when the sea has iced over. The sun was low in the sky. The walker was frozen fast in the ice. I carefully worked it loose, then started wheeling it towards land. The dog was limping along behind me. I would soon have to have him put down. Him and the cat. They were
both old, and their ancient bodies were causing them a lot of pain.

  When we came to the shore, I went to the boathouse and fetched a threadbare blanket that I laid out on Grandfather’s bench. I couldn’t go back to the house until I’d decided what to do. There was only one possible reason for Harriet being here. She was going to take me to task. After all these years, she wanted to know why I had left her. What could I say? Life had moved on, that was the way things turned out. Bearing in mind what had happened to me, Harriet ought to be grateful that I had vanished out of her life.

  It was cold, sitting there on the bench. I was about to get up when I heard noises in the distance. Voices and the sound of engines travel a long way over water and ice. I realised that it was Jansson. There wouldn’t be any post today, but he was busy running his illegal taxi service, no doubt. I walked back to the house. The cat was sitting on the steps, waiting to go in. But I shut her out.

  Before entering the kitchen, I examined my face in the mirror hanging in the hall. A hollow-eyed, unshaven face. Hair uncombed, lips squeezed together, deep-set eyes. Not exactly pretty. Unlike Harriet, who looked much the same as she had always done, I had changed with the passing years. I flatter myself that I looked pretty good when I was young. I certainly attracted a lot of interest from the girls in those days. Until the events that put an end to my career as a surgeon, I was very particular about what I looked like and how I dressed. It was when I moved out here to the island that deterioration set in. For several years, I removed the three mirrors that had been hanging in the house. I didn’t want to see myself. Six months could pass without my going to the mainland for a haircut.

  I stroked my hair with my fingers, and went into the kitchen.

  The sofa was bare. Harriet wasn’t there. The door to the living room was ajar, but the room was empty. The only thing in there was the gigantic anthill. Then I heard the toilet flushing. Harriet returned to the kitchen, and sat down on the sofa again.

  Once again, I could see from the way she moved that she was in pain but I couldn’t work out where.

  She had sat down on the sofa so that the light from the window fell over her face. She seemed to look just the same as she’d done when we used to wander around Stockholm in the spring evenings, when I was planning to flee without taking leave of her. The closer the day came, the more often I would assure her that I loved her. I was afraid that she would see through me, and discover my carefully planned treachery. But she believed me.

  She was staring out of the window.

  ‘There’s a crow on the lump of meat hanging in your tree.’

  ‘Bacon rind,’ I said. ‘Not a lump of meat. The small birds vanished when the gale blew up, before it became storm force and brought the blizzard with it. They always hide away when there’s a strong wind. I don’t know where they go.’

  She turned to face me.

  ‘You look terrible. Are you ill?’

  ‘I look like I always look. If you’d come tomorrow afternoon, I’d have been clean-shaven.’

  ‘I don’t recognise you.’

  ‘You’re the same as ever.’

  ‘Why do you have an anthill in your living room?’

  The question was direct, without hesitation.

  ‘If you hadn’t opened the door, you wouldn’t have seen it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to go snooping around your house. I was looking for the bathroom.’

  Harriet transfixed me with her clear eyes.

  ‘I have a question to ask you,’ she said. ‘Obviously, I ought to have been in touch before coming. But I didn’t want to risk you vanishing again.’

  ‘I have nowhere to run away to.’

  ‘Everybody has somewhere. But I want you to be here. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘You understand nothing at all. But I need to stay here for a few days, and I have difficulty in walking up and down stairs. May I sleep on this sofa?’

  Harriet wasn’t going to reproach me. So I was prepared to agree to anything. I told her that of course she could sleep on my sofa, if that’s what she wanted. As an alternative I had a collapsible camp bed that I could set up in the living room. Assuming she had no objection to sleeping in the same room as an anthill. She said she didn’t. I fetched the camp bed and erected it as far away from the anthill as possible. In the middle of the room was a table with a white cloth, and next to it was the anthill. It was almost as high as the table. Part of the cloth hanging down over the edge had been swallowed up by the anthill.

  I made the bed, and supplied an extra pillow as I remembered that Harriet always liked to have her head comparatively high when she slept.

  But not only then.

  Also when she made love. I soon learned that she liked to have several pillows underneath the back of her head. Had I ever asked her why that was so important? I couldn’t remember.

  I laid out the quilt, then looked out through the half-open door. Harriet was watching me. I switched on the two radiators, checked that they were warming up, and went into the kitchen. Harriet seemed to be recovering her strength. But she was hollow-eyed. Her face was constantly on the alert, ready to parry pain that could strike at any moment.

  ‘I’ll have a lie-down for a while,’ she said, and stood up.

  I opened the door for her. I’d closed it again even before she’d lain down. I felt a sudden urge to lock the door and throw the key away. One day Harriet would have been swallowed up by my anthill.

  I put on a jacket and went out.

  It was a fine day. The gusts of wind were becoming less violent. I listened for Jansson’s hydrocopter. Was that a chainsaw I could hear in the distance? Perhaps getting fuel for a fire?

  I walked down to the jetty and into the boathouse. A rowing boat was hanging there, suspended from ropes and pulleys, reminiscent of a gigantic fish that had been beached. There was a smell of tar in the boathouse. It was ages since I’d stopped using tar on the boats and fishing equipment out here in the archipelago, but I still have a few tins that I open now and then, just for the smell. It gives me a sense of tranquility – more than anything else is capable of.

  I tried to recall the details of our farewell that wasn’t a proper farewell, that spring evening thirty-seven years ago. We’d walked over Strömbron Bridge, strolled along the quay at Skeppsbro, and then continued to Slussen. What had we spoken about? Harriet had talked about her day in the shoe shop. She loved telling me about her customers. She could even turn a pair of galoshes and a tin of shoe polish for old leather boots into an adventure. Memories of events and conversations came back to me. It was as if an archive that had been closed for ever had suddenly been opened up.

  I sat on the bench on the jetty for a while before returning to the house. I peeped into the living room. Harriet was asleep, and had curled up like a little child. I felt a lump in my throat. That’s how she had always slept. I walked up the hill behind the house and gazed out over the white bay. It felt as if it was only now that I realised what I’d done on that occasion so long ago. I’d never dared to ask myself how Harriet had reacted to what had happened. When had it dawned on her that I would never be coming back? I had extreme difficulty in imagining the pain she must have felt when she knew that I had abandoned her.

  When I got back to the house, Harriet had woken up. She was sitting on the kitchen sofa, waiting for me. My ancient cat was lying on her knee.

  ‘Did you get some sleep?’ I asked. ‘Did the ants leave you in peace?’

  ‘I like the smell of the anthill.’

  ‘If the cat is pestering you we can throw her out.’

  ‘Do you think I look as if I’m being pestered?’

  I asked if she was hungry, and began preparing a meal. I had a hare in the freezer that Jansson had shot. But it would take too long to thaw out. Harriet sat on the sofa, watching me. I fried some cutlets and boiled some potatoes. We spoke hardly at all, and I was so nervous that I burned my hand on the frying pan. Why didn’
t she say anything? Why had she come?

  We ate in silence. I cleared the table and made coffee. My grandfather and grandmother always used to boil their coffee grains and water in a saucepan – there was no such thing as filter coffee in those days. I make my coffee like they used to do, and always count to seventeen once it starts boiling. Then it turns out exactly as I like it. I took out a couple of cups, put some cat food in a dish, and sat down on my chair. It was dark outside already. All the time, I was waiting for Harriet to explain why she had come. I asked if she wanted a refill. She slid her cup forward. The dog started scratching at the door. I let him in, gave him some food, then shut him in the hall with the walker.

  ‘Did you ever think we would meet again?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I asked what you thought.’

  ‘I don’t know what I thought.’

  ‘You are just as evasive now as you were in those days.’

  She withdrew into herself. She always used to do that when she’d been hurt, I remembered that clearly. I felt an urge to stretch out my hand over the table and touch her. Did she feel an urge to touch me? It was as if nearly forty years of silence had started to bounce back and forth between us. An ant crawled over the tablecloth. Had it come from the anthill in the living room, or had it been unable to find its way back to the nest I suspect was inside the south wall of the house?

  I stood up and said I was going to let the dog out. Her face was in shadow. It was a clear, starry night, dead calm. Whenever I see a sky like that, I wish I could write music. I walked down to the jetty again – I’d lost count of the number of times I’d done so already today. The dog ran out on to the ice in the light from the boathouse, and stopped where Harriet had been lying. The situation was unreal. A door had opened into the life I had more or less considered to be over, and the beautiful woman I had once loved but deceived had come back. In those days, when I used to meet her when she’d finished work in the shoe shop in Hamngatan, she used to be wheeling a bicycle. Now she supported herself on a wheeled walker. I felt lost. The dog returned, and we walked up to the house.