Italian Shoes

by Henning Mankell

  I wished I could have watched myself from a distance. Hidden among the surrounding trees, an observer scrutinising himself.

  As I walked back to the car, it occurred to me that things might now be drawing to a close.

  I would drop Harriet off wherever she wanted us to say farewell. I still knew no more than the basic fact that she lived somewhere in Stockholm. After that, I could return to my island. A fascinating thought struck me: I would send Jansson a picture postcard. I’d never have believed that I would write to him. But I needed him now. I’d buy a card with a picture depicting the endless forests, preferably one in which the trees were weighed down with snow. I would draw a cross in the middle of the trees, and write: ‘That’s where I am just now. I’ll be back home soon. Don’t forget to feed my pets.’

  Harriet had already got out of the car. She was standing behind her walker. We walked side by side along the path I’d dug. I had the feeling we were part of a procession heading for an altar.

  I wondered what she was thinking. She was looking round, searching for any sign of life in among the trees. But there was silence everywhere, apart from the faint hum from the car’s engine ticking over.

  ‘I’ve always been scared of walking on ice,’ she said without warning.

  ‘But you still had the courage to go to my island?’

  ‘Being scared doesn’t mean that I haven’t the courage to do things that frighten me.’

  ‘This pool isn’t frozen all the way down,’ I said. ‘But very nearly. The ice is over three feet thick. It could bear the weight of an elephant, if necessary.’

  She burst out laughing.

  ‘Now that would be a sight for sore eyes! An elephant standing out here on the ice, in order to calm me down! A holy elephant sent to save people who are frightened of thin ice!’

  We came to the middle.

  ‘I think I can see it in my mind’s eye,’ she said. ‘When the ice has gone.’

  ‘It looks its best when it’s raining,’ I said. ‘I wonder if there’s anything to beat a gentle shower of rain in the Swedish summer. Other countries have majestic buildings or vertiginous mountain peaks and deep ravines. We have our summer rain.’

  ‘And the silence.’

  We didn’t speak for a while. I tried to grasp the implications of our coming here. A promise had been fulfilled, many years too late. That was all, really. Our journey was now at an end. All that remained was the epilogue, a long journey south on frozen roads.

  ‘Have you been here since you abandoned me? Have you been here with somebody else?’

  ‘No such thought ever occurred to me.’

  ‘Why did you abandon me?’

  The question came like a blow to the solar plexus. I could see that she was upset again. She was holding on tightly to the handle of her walker.

  ‘The pain you caused me sent me to hell and back,’ she said. ‘I was forced to make such an effort to forget you, but I never succeeded in doing it. Now that I’m standing here at long last, on the lid of your forest pool, I regret having tracked you down. What good did I think it would do? I don’t know any more. I’m going to die soon. Why do I spend time opening up old wounds? Why am I here?’

  We probably stood there for a minute, no longer. Silent, avoiding each other’s gaze. Then she turned her walker round and started retracing her steps.

  There was something lying in the snow that I hadn’t noticed when I was digging out the path for Harriet. It was black. I screwed up my eyes, but couldn’t make out what it was. A dead animal? A stone? Harriet hadn’t noticed that I’d stopped. I stepped out into the snow at the side of the path, and approached the dark object.

  I ought to have understood the danger. My experience and knowledge of the ice and its unpredictability ought to have warned me. Far too late I realised that the dark patch was in fact the ice itself. I knew that for whatever reason, a small patch of ice could be very thin despite the fact that the ice all around it was very thick. I almost managed to stop and take a step backwards. But it was too late, the ice gave way and I fell through it. The water reached up to my chin. I ought to have been used to the sudden shock of entering ice-cold water, thanks to all my winter dips. But this was different. I wasn’t prepared, I hadn’t created the hole in the ice myself. I screamed. It wasn’t until I screamed again that Harriet turned round and saw me in the water. The cold had already begun to paralyse me, I had a burning sensation in my chest, I was desperately gulping down ice-cold air into my lungs and searching frantically for firm ground under my feet. I grasped at the edges of the hole, but my fingers were already far too stiff.

  I continued to scream, convinced I was face to face with death.

  I knew that she was the last person capable of helping me out. She could barely stand on her own two feet.

  But she astonished me as much as she astonished herself. She came towards me with her walker, as fast as she was able. She tipped the walker over, then lay down on the ice and pushed it towards the edge of the hole so that I was able to grab hold of one of the wheels. How I managed to pull myself up I shall never know. She must have pulled at me and tried to shuffle backwards through the snow. When I scrambled out, I staggered as best I could towards the car. I could hear her calling behind me, but I had no idea of what she was saying: what I did know was that if I stopped and fell over in the snow, I would never have the strength to stand up again. I couldn’t have been in the water for more than two minutes, but that had almost been enough to kill me. I have no memory of how I got from the hole in the ice to the car. I said nothing, probably closed my eyes so that I couldn’t see how far there was still to go to the car. When I eventually pressed my face against the boot, I had only one thought in my head: to strip off all the soaking wet clothes I had on, and roll the blanket on the back seat round my body. I have no recollection of how that was achieved. There was a strong smell of exhaust fumes around me as I wriggled out of the last piece of clothing and somehow managed to open the back door. I wrapped the blanket round me, and after that I lost consciousness.

  When I woke up, she was embracing me and was as naked as I was.

  Deep down in my consciousness, the cold had been transformed into a sensation of burning. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Harriet’s hair and the back of her neck. My memory slowly returned.

  I was alive. And Harriet had undressed and was hugging me under the blanket to keep me warm.

  She noticed that I had come round.

  ‘Are you cold? You could have died.’

  ‘The ice simply opened up underneath me.’

  ‘I thought it was an animal. I’ve never heard a scream like that before.’

  ‘How long was I unconscious?’

  ‘An hour.’

  ‘So long?’

  I closed my eyes. My body was scorching hot.

  ‘I didn’t want to see the lake only for you to die,’ she said.

  It was over now. Two old people, naked on the back seat of an old car. We had spoken about such things earlier, of young people in the backs of cars. Making love then perhaps denying it. But we two, with a combined age of 135, simply clung on to each other, one because he had survived, the other because she hadn’t been left all alone in the depths of the forest.

  After what might have been another hour, she moved to the front seat and got dressed.

  ‘It was easier when I was young,’ she said. ‘A clumsy old woman like me finds it difficult to get dressed in acar.’

  She fetched dry clothes for me from the rucksack in the boot. Before I put them on, she warmed them up by spreading them over the steering wheel, where the heat from the engine was being blown into the car. I could see through the windscreen that it had started snowing. I was worried in case the snow should start drifting, and prevent us from driving back to the main road.

  I dressed as quickly as I could, fumbling as if I was drunk.

  It was snowing heavily by the time we left the forest pool. But the logging road was
not yet impassable.

  We returned to the guest house. This time it was Harriet who went out with her walker to fetch the pizza we had for our evening meal.

  We shared one of her bottles of brandy.

  The last thing I saw before falling asleep was her face.

  It was very close. She may have been smiling. I hope she was.

  CHAPTER 10

  WHEN I WOKE up the next day, Harriet was sitting with the atlas open in front of her. My body felt as if it had been subjected to a severe beating. She asked how I felt. I said I was fine.

  ‘The interest,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Interest?’

  ‘On your promise. After all these years.’

  ‘What are you asking for?’

  ‘A diversion.’

  She pointed out where we were on the map. Instead of moving her finger southwards, she moved it eastwards, towards the coast, and the province of Hälsingland. It came to a halt not far from Hudiksvall.

  ‘To there.’

  ‘And what’s in store for you there?’

  ‘My daughter. I want you to meet her. It will take an extra day, perhaps two.’

  ‘Why does she live there?’

  ‘Why do you live on your island?’

  Needless to say, I did as she requested. We drove towards the coast. The countryside was exactly the same all the way: isolated houses with their satellite dishes, and no sign of any people.

  Late in the afternoon Harriet said she was too tired to go any further. We checked into a hotel in Delsbo. The room was small and dusty. Harriet took her medicine and painkillers, and fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. Perhaps she took a drink without my noticing. I went out, found a chemist’s and bought a pharmaceutical handbook. Then I sat down in a cafe and read about her medication.

  There was something unreal about sitting in a cafe with a cup of coffee and a cream bun – with several small children shouting and screaming to attract the attention of their mothers, who were absorbed in well-thumbed magazines – and discovering just how ill Harriet was. I felt increasingly that I was paying a visit to a world I had lost contact with during my years on my grandparents’ island. For twelve years I had denied the existence of anything beyond the beaches and cliffs surrounding me, a world that had no relevance for me. I had turned myself into a hermit with no knowledge of what was happening outside the cave in which I was hidden away.

  But in that cafe in Delsbo, it became clear to me that I couldn’t continue to live the life I was leading. I would return to my island, of course: I had nowhere else to go. But nothing would ever be the same as it was. The moment I noticed that dark shadow on the expanse of white snow and ice, a door had slammed behind me and would never be opened again.

  I had bought a picture postcard in a corner shop. It depicted a fence covered in snow. I sent it to Jansson.

  I asked him to feed the animals. Nothing else.

  Harriet was awake when I got back. She shook her head when she saw the book I was carrying.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about my woes today.’

  We went to the neighbouring grill bar for dinner.

  When I saw the kitchen and breathed the smell of cooking, it occurred to me that we were living in an age of deep-frying and ready-made meals. It was not long before Harriet slid her plate away and announced that she couldn’t eat another mouthful. I tried to urge her to eat a little bit more – but why? A dying person eats no more than is necessary to sustain the short life remaining.

  We soon returned to our room. The walls were thin. We could hear two people talking in a neighbouring room. Their voices rose and fell. Both Harriet and I strained our ears, but we were unable to make out any words.

  ‘Are you still an eavesdropper?’ she asked.

  ‘There are no conversations on my island for me to overhear,’ I said.

  ‘You always used to eavesdrop on my telephone conversations, despite the fact that you pretended to be uninterested and thumbed through a book or a newspaper. That’s how you tried to hide your big ears. Do you remember?’

  I was upset. She was right, of course. I’ve always been an eavesdropper, ever since the time when I used to listen in to the angst-ridden conversations between my father and mother. I have stood behind half-open doors and listened to my colleagues, to patients, to people’s intimate conversations in cafes or on trains. I discovered that most conversations contained small, almost unnoticeable lies. I used to ask myself if that’s the way it’s always been. Has it always been necessary for conversations between people to contain barely noticeable elements of untruth in order to get anywhere?

  The conversation in the next room had come to an end. Harriet was tired. She lay down and closed her eyes.

  I put on my jacket, and went out to explore the deserted little town. Wherever you looked was blue light oozing out of barred windows. The occasional moped, a car travelling far too fast, then silence again. Harriet wanted me to meet her daughter. I wondered why. Was it to show me that she had managed perfectly well without me, that she had borne the child I hadn’t been privileged to give her? I felt pangs of sorrow as I trudged through the wintry evening.

  I paused at a brightly lit ice rink, where a few young people were skating around with bandy sticks and a red ball. I suddenly felt very close to my own younger days. The crackling sound of skates on ice, of stick against ball, the occasional shout, skaters falling over only to scramble to their feet again immediately. That’s how I remembered it, although in fact I had never laid my hands on a bandy stick: I had been shunted off to an ice-hockey rink, where the play was no doubt a lot more painful than what I was watching taking place.

  Get back on your feet as soon as you fall.

  That was the message to be learned from the freezing cold ice-hockey rinks of my youth. A lesson to be applied to the life that was in store for us.

  Always scramble up again when you fall down. Never stay down. But that was precisely what I had done. I had stayed down after making my big mistake.

  I watched them playing, and soon picked out a very little boy, the smallest of them all, albeit fat – or perhaps he was wearing more protective clothing than the rest? But he was the best. He accelerated quicker than any of the others, dribbled the ball with his stick without even needing to look at what he was doing, feinted with astonishing speed, and was always in exactly the right position to receive a pass. A fat little lad who was a faster skater than any of the others. I tried to imagine which of the skaters out there was most like me at their age. Which one would I have been, with my much heavier ice-hockey stick? Certainly not the little boy who could skate so fast and had a much better ball sense than most. I would have been one of the also-rans – a blueberry that could be picked and replaced with any other blueberry around.

  Never stay down if you don’t have to.

  I had done what you should never do.

  I went back to the hotel. There was no night porter. The room key opened the outside door. Harriet had gone to bed. One of the brandy bottles was standing on her bedside table.

  ‘I thought you must have run away,’ she said. ‘I’m going to sleep now. I’ve taken a dram and a sleeping pill.’

  She turned on to her side, and was soon asleep. I cautiously took hold of her wrist and measured her pulse: 78 beats per minute. I sat down on a chair, switched on the television, and watched a news broadcast with the sound turned down so low that not even my eavesdropping ears were able to hear a word of what was said. The pictures seemed to be the same as usual. Bleeding, tortured, suffering specimens of humanity. And then a series of well-dressed men making endless pronouncements, displaying no sign of sympathy, only arrogant smiles. I switched off the television and lay down on the bed. I thought about the young female police officer with the blonde hair before falling asleep.

  At one o’clock the next day we were approaching Hudiksvall. It had stopped snowing, and there was no ice on the roads. Harriet pointed out a road sign to Rångevallen. The surfac
e was terrible, destroyed by monster tree-felling machines. We turned off again, this time on to a private road. The forest was very dense. I wondered what kind of a person Harriet’s daughter was, living like this so remotely in the depths of the forest. The only question I had put to Harriet during our journey was whether Louise had a husband or any children. She didn’t. Logs were stacked in various appropriate places by the roadside. The road reminded me of the one that had led to Sara Larsson’s house.

  When we eventually came to a clearing, I saw several ruined buildings and dilapidated fences. And a large caravan with a tented extension.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Harriet. ‘This is where my daughter lives.’

  ‘In the caravan?’

  ‘Can you see any other building with a roof that hasn’t collapsed?’

  I helped her out of the car, and fetched her walker. There was the sound of an engine coming from what might once have been a dog kennel. It could hardly be anything else but a generator. There was a satellite dish on the roof of the caravan. We stood there for several minutes without anything happening. I felt an intense desire to return to my island.

  The caravan door opened. A woman emerged.

  She was wearing a pink dressing gown and high-heeled shoes. It seemed to me anything but easy to estimate her age. She had a pack of cards in one hand.

  ‘This is my daughter,’ said Harriet.

  She pushed her walker through the snow to where the woman was trying to stand steadily on her high heels.

  I stayed where I was.

  ‘This is your father,’ said Harriet to her daughter.

  There was snow in the air. I thought of Jansson, and wished to goodness that he could have come to collect me in his hydrocopter.

  THE FOREST

  CHAPTER 1

  MY DAUGHTER DOESN’T have a well of her own.