Italian Shoes

by Henning Mankell

  Needless to say, there was no running water in her caravan; nor was there any sign of a pump anywhere on the site. In order to fetch water, I had to follow a path down the slope, through a copse, and eventually to another deserted farm with glassless windows and suspicious crows perched on the chimneys. In the yard was a rusty pump which produced water. As I raised and lowered the handle, the rusty iron screamed in pain.

  The crows were motionless.

  This was the first thing my daughter had asked me to do for her. To fetch two buckets of water. I’m just thankful that she didn’t say anything else. She could have yelled at me and told me to clear off, or she could have been overcome with joy at finally meeting her father. But all she did was ask me to fetch some water. I took the buckets and followed the path through the snow. I wondered if she would normally go herself in her dressing gown and high-heeled shoes. But what I wondered most of all was what had happened all those years ago, and why nobody had told me anything about it.

  It was 250 yards to the abandoned farm. When Harriet said that the woman standing by the caravan was my daughter, I knew immediately that she was telling the truth. Harriet was incapable of lying. I searched my memory for the moment when she must have been conceived. As I trudged through the snow, it struck me that the only possibility was that Harriet had discovered she was pregnant after I’d disappeared. So the moment of conception must have been a month or so before we parted.

  I tried hard to remember.

  The forest was silent. I felt like a gnome making his way through the snow in some ancient fairy tale. We had only ever made love on her sofa bed. So that was where my daughter must have been created. When I left for America and Harriet had waited for me in vain at the airport, she would have known nothing about it. She only became aware of the situation later, and I had vanished by then.

  I pumped up the water. Then I stood the buckets by the side of the pump and went into the abandoned house. The front door was rotten – it collapsed as I nudged it open with my foot.

  I wandered round the rooms, which smelled of mould and rotten wood. It was like examining a shipwrecked liner. Bits of newspaper protruded from behind torn wallpaper. A page of Ljusnan from 12 March 1969: A car crash took place on . . . The rest of the article was missing. In this picture, Mrs Mattsson is displaying one of her most recent tapestries created with her customary loving care . . . The picture was torn, Mrs Mattsson’s face was still visible, and one of her hands, but no tapestry. In the bedroom was what was left of a double bed. It seemed to have been chopped to pieces with an axe. Somebody had vented his fury on the bed and made certain that it could never ever be slept in again.

  I tried to conjure up images of the people who had lived in the house, and one day left it, never to return. But their faces were averted. Abandoned houses are like empty showcases in a museum. I left the building and tried to come to grips with the thought that I had acquired a daughter, out of the blue, who lived in the forest to the south of Hudiksvall. A daughter who must be thirty-seven years of age, and lived in a caravan. A woman who walked through the snow in a pink dressing gown and high-heeled shoes.

  One thing was clear to me.

  Harriet had not prepared her for this. She knew that she had a father, of course, but not that I was him. I was not the only one to be surprised. Harriet had astounded us both.

  I picked up the buckets and started to make my way back. Why was my daughter living in a caravan in the depths of the forest? Who was she? When we shook hands, I hadn’t dared to look her in the eye. She was surrounded by a strong smell of perfume. Her hand was sweaty.

  I put down the buckets to rest my arms.

  ‘Louise,’ I said aloud to myself. ‘I have a daughter called Louise.’

  The words struck me dumb, made me a little afraid, but also exhilarated. Harriet had come to me over the ice in Jansson’s hydrocopter, bringing with her news about life, and not just the death that would soon claim her.

  I picked up the buckets again and carried them to the caravan. I knocked on the door. Louise opened it. She was still wearing the high-heeled shoes, but she had replaced the pink dressing gown with trousers and a jumper. She had a very attractive figure. She made me feel embarrassed.

  The caravan was cramped. Harriet had squeezed on to a bench-cum-bed behind a little table in front of the window. She was smiling. I smiled back at her. It was warm in the caravan. Louise was busy making coffee.

  Louise had a lovely voice, just like her mother’s. If ice could sing, so could my daughter.

  I looked round the caravan. Dried roses hanging from the ceiling, a shelf with documents and letters, an old-fashioned typewriter on a stool. A radio but no television set. I started worrying about the kind of life she led. It seemed reminiscent of my own.

  And now you’ve turned up in my life, I thought. The most unexpected thing that has ever happened to me.

  Louise produced a Thermos of coffee and some plastic mugs. I sat down on the bed next to Harriet. Louise remained standing, looking at me.

  ‘I’m pleased to note that I haven’t burst out crying,’ she said. ‘But I’m even more pleased to note that you haven’t gone overboard and insisted how happy you are about what you’ve just discovered.’

  ‘It hasn’t sunk in yet. But then again, I never get so excited that I lose control of myself.’

  ‘Maybe you think it’s not true?’

  I thought about all those dust-covered bundles of legal documents containing statements made by young men swearing that they were not the father.

  ‘I’m quite sure it’s true.’

  ‘Do you feel sad because you didn’t know about me sooner? Because I’ve come into your life so late?’

  ‘I’m pretty immune to sadness,’ I said. ‘Just now I’m more surprised than anything else. Until an hour ago, I didn’t have any children. I didn’t think I ever would.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  I looked at Harriet. So she hadn’t told Louise anything at all about her father, not even that he was a doctor. That shocked me. What had she said about me? That her daughter had a father who was just a ship passing in the night?

  ‘I’m a doctor. Or was a doctor, rather.’

  Louise looked quizzically at me, coffee mug in hand. I noticed that she had a ring on every one of her fingers, and her thumbs as well.

  ‘What sort of a doctor?’

  ‘I was a surgeon.’

  She pulled a face. I thought about my father, and his reaction when I told him at the age of fifteen what I wanted to be.

  ‘Can you write prescriptions?’

  ‘Not any more. I’m retired.’

  ‘More’s the pity.’

  Louise put down her mug of coffee and pulled a woolly hat over her head.

  ‘If you need a pee you go behind the caravan, then cover it up with snow afterwards. If you need to do something more substantial, you use the dry closet next to the woodshed.’

  She went out, slightly unsteady on her high-heeled shoes. I turned to Harriet.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about her? It’s disgraceful!’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me about disgraceful behaviour! I didn’t know how you would react.’

  ‘It would have been easier if you’d prepared me for it.’

  ‘I didn’t dare. Maybe you’d have thrown me out of the car and left me by the roadside. How could I know if you really wanted a child?’

  Harriet was right. She couldn’t have known how I would react. She had every reason to distrust me.

  ‘Why does she live like this? What does she do for a living?’

  ‘It’s her choice. I don’t know what she does.’

  ‘But you must have some idea?’

  ‘She writes letters.’

  ‘Surely she can’t make a living out of that?’

  ‘It seems to be possible.’

  It occurred to me that the caravan walls were thin, and that my daughter might be standing out there with her ear pres
sed up against the cold plastic, or whatever it was. Perhaps she had inherited my tendency to eavesdrop?

  I lowered my voice to a whisper.

  ‘Why does she look like she does? Why does she walk around in the snow wearing high heels?’

  ‘My daughter –’

  ‘Our daughter!’

  ‘Our daughter has always had a mind of her own. Even when she was five, I had the feeling that she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life, and that I would never be able to make her out.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘She’s always chosen to live her life without worrying too much about what other people think. Her shoes, for example. They are very expensive. Ajello, made in Milan. Very few people dare to live the way she does.’

  The door opened, and our daughter came back in.

  ‘I need to rest,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘You’ve always been tired,’ said Louise.

  ‘I haven’t always been dying.’

  For a brief moment, they were hissing at each other, like cats. Not exactly in a nasty way, but not exactly friendly either. In any case, neither of them seemed to be surprised by the other’s reaction. So Louise was aware of the fact that her mother was dying.

  I stood up so that Harriet could lie down on the narrow bed. Louise put on a pair of boots.

  ‘Let’s go out for a walk,’ she said. ‘I need some exercise. And besides, I think we’re both a bit shaken.’

  There was a well-worn path heading in the opposite direction to the abandoned farm. We passed an old earth cellar and entered a dense conifer wood. She was walking quickly, and I had difficulty in keeping up with her. She suddenly turned round to face me.

  ‘I thought I had a father who had gone to America and vanished. A father called Henry who was mad about bees, and spent his time researching into how they lived. But the years passed by, and he didn’t even send me a jar of honey. I thought he was dead. But you’re not dead. I’ve actually met you. When we get back to the caravan I’m going to take a photograph of you and Harriet. I have lots of photos of her, on her own or together with me. But I want a photo of both my parents before it’s too late.’

  We continued walking along the path.

  It seemed to me that Harriet had told Louise the facts. Or at least as much of the facts as she could, without telling a lie. I had gone to America, and I had vanished. And in my youth I’d been interested in bees. Moreover, it was certainly true that I wasn’t yet dead.

  We continued walking through the snow.

  She would get her photograph of her parents.

  It wasn’t yet too late to take the picture she needed.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE SUN HAD sunk down towards the horizon.

  In the middle of a little field was a boxing ring, covered in snow. It looked as if somebody had thrown it out, and it had just happened to land there in the whiteness. Half hidden in the snow were a couple of ramshackle wooden benches that might well have been taken from a chapel or a cinema.

  ‘We have boxing matches in spring and summer,’ she said. ‘We generally start the season in mid-May. That’s when we have the weigh-in, using some old scales from a dairy.’

  ‘We? Are you telling me that you box as well?’

  ‘Of course. Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Who do you box with?’

  ‘My friends. People from around here who have chosen to live the kind of life they think suits them best. Leif, for instance, who lives with his old mum who used to run the biggest moonshine operation for miles around. Amandus, who plays the fiddle and has very strong fists.’

  ‘But surely you can’t be a boxer and play the violin as well? How do his fingers cope?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Amandus that. Ask the others.’

  She didn’t tell me who the others were. She continued along the well-trodden path leading to a barn at the other side of the boxing ring. As I observed her from behind, it struck me that her body was very much like Harriet’s. But what had my daughter looked like when she was a little girl? Or when she was a teenager? I trudged along through the snow and tried to think myself back in time. Louise was born in 1967. She was a teenager when I was at the height of my career as a surgeon. I suddenly felt a surge of anger. Why had Harriet not said anything?

  Louise pointed to some tracks in the snow and said they had been made by a wolverine. She opened the barn door. There was a paraffin lamp on the floor: she lit it and hung it from a hook in the ceiling. It was like entering an old-fashioned gym used by boxers or wrestlers. Dotted around on the floor were dumb-bells and weightlifting bars, a punchbag hung down from the ceiling, and on a bench was a neatly coiled skipping rope and several pairs of red and black boxing gloves.

  ‘If it had been spring, I’d have suggested we should have a couple of rounds,’ Louise said. ‘I can’t think of a better way of starting to get to know a father I’ve never met before. In more than one sense.’

  ‘I have never, ever worn a pair of boxing gloves.’

  ‘But you must have been in a fight or two?’

  ‘When I was thirteen or fourteen, I suppose. But they were more like wrestling matches in the school playground.’

  Louise stood by the punchbag and set it swaying gently back and forth with her shoulder. The paraffin lamp was shining just above her head. I still thought it was Harriet I was looking at.

  ‘I’m nervous,’ she said. ‘Have you any more children?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘No, none at all. What about you?’

  ‘None.’

  The punchbag was still swaying back and forth.

  ‘I’m just as confused as you are,’ she said. ‘There have been times when I’ve remembered that I must have had a father, despite everything, and the thought has made me furious. I think that’s why I took up boxing. So that I could knock him out on the day that he rose from the dead, and count him out into eternity, as my revenge for him abandoning me.’

  The light from the lamp danced around the rough walls. I told her about how Harriet had suddenly turned up on the ice, about the forest pool, and the detour she had suddenly asked me to make.

  ‘Didn’t she say anything about me?’

  ‘No, all she spoke about was the forest pool. Then she said that she wanted me to meet her daughter.’

  ‘I ought to throw her out really. She’s made fools of us both. But you don’t throw out somebody who’s ill.’

  She raised her hand and stopped the punchbag swinging.

  ‘Is it true that she’s going to die soon? You’re a doctor – you must know if she’s telling the truth.’

  ‘She’s very ill indeed. But I don’t know when she’s going to die. Nobody could put a date on that.’

  ‘I don’t want her to die in my caravan,’ said Louise, blowing out the paraffin lamp.

  We stood there in the pitch dark. Our fingers happened to meet. She took hold of my hand. She was strong.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve turned up,’ she said. ‘I suppose that, deep down, I’ve always thought you would do one day.’

  ‘It had never occurred to me that I might have a child.’

  ‘You don’t have a child. You have a grown-up woman approaching middle age.’

  When we emerged from the barn, I could see her in front of me as a silhouette. The stars seemed to be almost within reach, glittering.

  ‘It’s never completely dark up here in the far north,’ said Louise. ‘When you live in a big town, you don’t see the stars any more. That’s why I live here. When I lived in Stockholm, I used to miss the silence, but most of all the stars. I don’t understand why it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that in this country we have fantastic natural resources just waiting to be exploited. Why is nobody selling silence, in the same way that they sell the forests and the iron ore?’

  I knew what she meant. Silence, starry skies, perhaps also solitariness – such things
simply don’t exist any more for most people. I was beginning to think that she was very like me, despite everything.

  ‘I’m going to start a company,’ she said. ‘My boxer friends are going to be partners. We’re going to start selling these glittering, silent nights. We’ll all be very rich one of these days, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Who are these friends of yours?’

  ‘There’s a deserted village a few miles north of here. Its last inhabitant moved out one day in the 1970s. All the houses were empty, nobody even wanted them as holiday cottages. But Mr Mateotti, an old Italian shoemaker, came here while on his journey looking for silence. Now he’s living in one of those houses, and he makes two pairs of shoes per year. At the beginning of May every year, a helicopter lands in the field behind his house. A man from Paris comes to pick up the shoes, pays him for his work, and passes on the orders for the shoes Giaconelli is expected to make in the coming year. There’s an old rock singer living in Sparrman’s village store that closed down years ago. He used to call himself the Red Bear, and he had two gold discs, making him a candidate for the Swedish King of Rock in competition with Ricky Rock and Gary Granite. His hair was bright red, and he made a scrumptious recording of “Peggy Sue”. But when we celebrate midsummer and sit down to eat at our table in the boxing ring, we all want him to sing “The Great Pretender”.’

  I remembered that hit very well, in the original version recorded by the Platters. Harriet and I had even danced to it. I think I could remember all the words, if I put my mind to it.

  But the Red Bear and his gold discs – that meant nothing to me at all.

  ‘It sounds as if there are a lot of remarkable people living around here.’

  ‘There are remarkable people living everywhere, but nobody notices them because they’re old. We live in an age when old people are supposed to be as transparent as a sheet of glass. It’s best if we don’t even notice that they exist. You are becoming more and more transparent as well. My mother has been for ages.’

  We stood there in silence. I could just about make out the lights from the caravan in the distance.

  ‘Sometimes I feel an urge to lie down out here in the snow in my sleeping bag,’ said Louise. ‘When it’s full moon, the blue light gives me the feeling of being in a desert. It’s cold at night in the desert as well.’