Italian Shoes

by Henning Mankell

  I flung my arms out wide.

  ‘That wasn’t my intention. Perhaps I’m tired. It’s nearly half past six in the morning. We’ve spent the whole night here. We need a few hours’ sleep.’

  ‘Let’s go home, then,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘The hospital hasn’t rung.’

  I remained seated.

  ‘I can’t sleep in that narrow bed.’

  ‘Then I’ll sleep on the floor.’

  ‘It’s not worth going home. We’ll have to return to the hospital as soon as we get there.’

  She sat down again. I could see that she was just as tired as me. The man behind the counter had fallen asleep again, his chin hanging down towards his chest.

  The neon lights on the ceiling continued to stare down at us, like the scheming eyes of a dragon.

  CHAPTER 5

  DAWN CAME AS a relief.

  We returned to the hospital at half past eight. It had started snowing, just a few flakes. I could see my tired face in the rear-view mirror. It made me wince, gave me a feeling of death, of inexorability.

  I was on a downward path, hemmed in by my own epilogue. There were a few entries and exits still to go, but not much more.

  I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I missed the turning for the hospital. Louise looked at me in surprise.

  ‘We should have turned right there.’

  I said nothing, drove round the block and then took the correct turning. Standing outside the A&E entrance was one of the nurses who had received us during the night. She was smoking a cigarette and seemed to have forgotten who we were. In another age, I thought, she could have been in one of Caravaggio’s paintings.

  We went in. The door to Harriet’s room was open. The room was empty. A nurse approached along the corridor. I asked about Harriet. She looked searchingly at us. We must have resembled a pair of woodlice that had crept out into view after a night spent under a cold stone.

  ‘Mrs Hörnfeldt is no longer here,’ she said.

  ‘Where have you sent her?’

  ‘We haven’t sent her anywhere. She simply went away. She got dressed and vanished.’

  She seemed angry, as if Harriet had let her down personally.

  ‘But somebody must have seen her go, surely?’ I said.

  ‘The night staff kept checking regularly, but when they looked in at a quarter past seven, she had left. There’s nothing we can do.’

  I turned to Louise. She made a movement with her eyes that I interpreted as a signal.

  ‘Did she leave anything behind?’ Louise asked.

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Then she must have gone home.’

  ‘She ought to have informed us if she didn’t want to stay here.’

  ‘That’s the way she is,’ said Louise. ‘That’s my mother for you.’

  We left through the A&E entrance.

  ‘I know what she’s like,’ said Louise. ‘I also know where she is. We have an agreement that we made when I was a little girl. The nearest cafe, that’s where we’ll meet. If we ever get separated.’

  We walked round the hospital to the main entrance. There was a cafe area in the big foyer.

  Harriet was sitting at a table with a cup of coffee. She waved when she saw us coming. She appeared almost cheerful.

  ‘We still don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ I said sternly. ‘The doctors ought to have been given an opportunity to check the samples they’ve taken.’

  ‘I’ve got cancer,’ said Harriet, ‘and I’m going to die. Time is too short for me to lie around in hospital and start panicking. I don’t know what happened yesterday. I expect I drank too much. I want to go home now.’

  ‘To my place, or to Stockholm?’

  Harriet took hold of Louise’s arm and pulled herself up. Her walker was standing by a newspaper stall. She grasped at the handles with her frail fingers. It was impossible to understand how she had managed to pull me out of the forest pool.

  When we got back to the caravan, all three of us lay down on the narrow bed. I lay on the outside with one knee on the floor, and soon fell asleep.

  In my dreams, Jansson approached me in his hydrocopter. It carved its way towards me like a sharp saw cutting through ice. I hid behind a rock until he had gone away. When I stood up I saw Harriet standing on the ice with the wheeled walker. She was naked. Next to her was a large hole in the ice.

  I woke up with a start. The two women were asleep. I thought of grabbing my jacket and getting out of there. But I stayed put. Soon, I fell asleep again.

  We all woke up at the same time. It was one o’clock. I went outside for a pee. It had stopped snowing and the clouds had started to part.

  We drank coffee. Harriet asked me to take her blood pressure as she had a headache. It was only slightly above normal. Louise wanted me to take her blood pressure as well.

  ‘One of my first memories of my father will be that he took my blood pressure,’ she said. ‘First the buckets of water, and now this.’

  It was very low. I asked if she sometimes had bouts of dizziness.

  ‘Only when I’m drunk.’

  ‘Never on other occasions?’

  ‘I’ve never fainted in my life.’

  I put my blood pressure monitor away. We had finished the coffee, and it was a quarter past two. It was warm inside the caravan. Perhaps too warm? Was it the stifling air, short of oxygen, that caused them to lose their tempers? But whatever the cause, I was suddenly attacked from two sides. It started with Harriet asking me what it felt like, having a daughter, now that I’d known about it for a few days.

  ‘What does it feel like? I don’t think I can answer that one.’

  ‘Your indifference is frightening,’ she said.

  ‘You know nothing about how I’m feeling,’ I said.

  ‘I know you.’

  ‘We haven’t met for nearly forty years! I’m not the same as I was then.’

  ‘You’re too cowardly to admit that what I say is true. You didn’t have the courage then to say that you wanted us to stop seeing each other. You ran away then, and you’re running away now. Can’t you bring yourself to tell the truth just once? Is there no truth in you at all?’

  Before I had chance to say anything, Louise chipped in that a man who had abandoned Harriet in the way I had done could hardly be expected to react to an unexpected child with anything but indifference, perhaps fear, and at most with a bit of curiosity.

  ‘I can’t go along with that,’ I said. ‘I’ve apologised for what I did, and I couldn’t have known anything about a child because you never told me.’

  ‘How could I tell you when you’d run away?’

  ‘In the car on the way to the forest pool, you said you’d never tried to find me.’

  ‘Are you accusing a dying person of lying?’

  ‘I’m not accusing anybody.’

  ‘Tell it as it is!’ yelled Louise. ‘Answer her question!’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘Why you’re indifferent.’

  ‘I’m not indifferent. I’m pleased.’

  ‘I see no sign of pleasure in you.’

  ‘There’s not enough room in this caravan to dance on the table! If that’s what you’d like me to do.’

  ‘Don’t think for one moment I’m doing this for you,’ screeched Harriet. ‘I’m doing it for her sake.’

  We yelled and shouted. The walls of the cramped caravan came close to collapsing. Deep down, of course, I knew that what they were saying was true. I had let Harriet down, and perhaps I hadn’t displayed enough ebullient happiness on meeting my daughter. Nevertheless, this was too much. I couldn’t take it. I don’t know how long we carried on with this pointless shouting and sparring. On several occasions I expected Louise to clench her boxer’s fists and give me a telling punch. I daren’t even begin to think about what level Harriet’s blood pressure reached. In the end I stood up, grabbed my bag and my jacket and shoes.

  ‘Go to hell, the pair of you!’ I yelled as
I stormed out of the caravan.

  Louise didn’t follow me out. Neither of them said a word. Everything was silent. I walked down to the car in my stockinged feet, got in and drove off. Not until I came to the main road did I stop, remove my soaking wet socks and put on my shoes over my bare feet.

  I was still upset about the accusations. During the journey the exchanges came back to me in my head, over and over again. I sometimes changed what I had said, made my responses clearer, sharper. But what they had said was the same all the time.

  I reached Stockholm in the middle of the night, having driven far too quickly; I slept in the car for a while until it became too cold, then continued as far as Södertälje. I hadn’t the strength to drive any further. I checked into a motel, and fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow. At about one the next day I continued my journey south, having telephoned Jansson and left a message on his answering machine: could he collect me at half past five? I wasn’t sure how he felt about driving in the dark. I crossed my fingers and hoped he would check his messages and had some decent headlights on his hydrocopter.

  Jansson was waiting when I arrived at the harbour. He told me he had been feeding the animals every day. I thanked him and said I was in a hurry to get home.

  When we arrived, Jansson refused to accept any payment.

  ‘I can’t take a fare from my doctor.’

  ‘I’m not your doctor. We can settle up the next time you come.’

  I remained standing on the jetty until he had disappeared behind the rocks and the lights had faded away. I suddenly noticed that my cat and my dog were sitting next to me on the jetty. I bent down to stroke them. The dog seemed to be thinner than he had been. I left my rucksack on the jetty, I was too tired to see to it.

  There were three of us on this island, just as there had been three of us in the caravan. But nobody would be launching an attack on me here. It was a relief to enter my own kitchen again. I fed the animals, sat down at the kitchen table and closed my eyes.

  I had difficulty in sleeping that night. I got out of bed again and again. It was full moon, the sky was clear. The moonlight oozed over the rocks and the white ice. I put on my boots and fur coat and went down to the jetty. The dog didn’t notice that I had gone out, and the cat opened an eye but didn’t stir from the sofa. It was cold outside. My suitcase had somehow burst open, shirts and socks had fallen out. For the second time, I left it to its fate.

  It was while I was standing there on the jetty that I realised I had another journey to make. For twelve years I had succeeded in convincing myself that it wasn’t necessary, but the meeting with Louise and our long nocturnal conversation had changed all that. I was obliged to undertake this new journey. And I now wanted to do it.

  Somewhere in Sweden there was a young woman who had lost an arm – the wrong arm amputated by me. She was twenty years old when it happened, so now she would be thirty-two. I could remember her name: Agnes Klarström. As I stood on the jetty, all the details came back to me – as if I had just reread her case notes. She came from one of the southern suburbs of Stockholm, Aspudden or Bagarmossen. It had all started as a pain in her shoulder. She was an outstanding swimmer and took part in competitions. For a long time she and her trainer assumed it was due to overexertion, but when it came to the point that she could no longer enter a pool without severe shoulder pains, she went to a doctor for a thorough examination. Then everything happened very quickly: a malignant bone tumour was confirmed, and amputation was the only possibility, despite the fact that it would be catastrophic for her swimming ambitions. Having been a swimming champion, she would be one-armed for the rest of her life.

  I wasn’t even down for the operation – she was the patient of one of my colleagues. But his wife was involved in a serious car crash, and his operations list was farmed out somewhat haphazardly among the other orthopaedic surgeons. Agnes Klarström was assigned to me.

  The operation took longer than an hour. I can still recall all the details, how the theatre nurses washed and prepared the wrong arm. It was my responsibility to check that the correct arm would be operated on, but I relied on my staff.

  That was twelve years ago now. I had ruined Agnes Klarström’s life, and also my own. And what made matters even worse was that a subsequent examination of the arm with the tumour indicated that amputation had not been necessary.

  It had never occurred to me that I would one day go to visit her. The only time I had ever spoken to her was immediately after the operation when she was still groggy.

  It was two in the morning by now. I went back to the house and sat down at my kitchen table. I still hadn’t opened the door of my ant room. Perhaps I was afraid they would come teeming out if I did so.

  I rang directory enquiries, but there was nobody in Stockholm of that name. I asked the operator, who said her name was Elin, to extend the search to the whole of Sweden.

  There was one Agnes Klarström who could be the one I was looking for. She lived near Flen, some fifty miles west of Stockholm: the address suggested a farm in a village called Sångledsbyn. I made a note of the address and her telephone number.

  The dog was asleep. The cat was outside in the moonlight. I stood up and went to the room in which a half-finished mat was still stretched over the frame of my grandmother’s loom. It had always been a significant image as far as I was concerned: this is what death always looks like when it rudely interrupts and terminates our lives. On a shelf where there had previously been reels of thread, I stored various papers I had been keeping for many years. A thin file containing documents, from my rather poor school-leaving report that my father was so proud of that he learned it off by heart, to the accursed copy of the notes of the amputation. The file was sparse because I have always had no difficulty in discarding papers that most people regard as important to keep. On top was the will that a ridiculously expensive lawyer had drawn up for me. Now I was forced to change it, because I had acquired a daughter. But that was not the reason I had come to the room with the loom that still smelled of my grandmother. I took out the operation notes from 9 March 1991. I spread the sheet of paper out on the table in front of me and read it from first to last.

  Every word was like a sharp stone paving the path to my ruin. From the very first words: Diagnosis: chondrosarcoma of the proximal humerus sin, to the last one of all, Bandaging.

  Bandaging. That was all. The operation was over, the patient was wheeled away to the recovery room. Minus an arm, but still with that confounded tumour in the bone of the other upper arm.

  I read: Pre-op assessment. Twenty-year-old right-handed woman, previously basically healthy, examined in Stockholm due to swollen left upper arm. MRI scan shows low-grade chondrosarcoma left upper arm. Subsequent scan confirms diagnosis, patient agrees to amputation of proximal humerus which allows adequate margin. Operation: intubation narcosis, sunbed position, arm exposed. Usual antibiotic prophylaxis. Incision from coracoid process along lower edge of deltoid to the anterior fold of the axilla. Ligation of a cephalic vein and detachment of pectoralis. Identification of vascular structure, ligation of veins and securing of arteries with double ligatures. Extrusion of nerves from wound, and division. Then separation of deltoid muscle from humerus, and of latissimus dorsi and teres major. Separation of long and short head of biceps, also of coracobrachialis slightly below amputation level. Humerus sawn off at surgical neck and filed. Stump covered by triceps, which are separated, and by coracobrachialis. Pectoralis sewn to lateral edge of humerus using osteo-sutures. Drain inserted and skin flaps stitched together with no tension. Bandaging.

  I supposed Agnes Klarström must have read this text many times, and had it explained to her. She must have noticed that among all the Latin terms, an everyday word suddenly cropped up: she had been operated on in a ‘sunbed position’. As if she had been lying on a beach or a veranda, with her arm exposed, and the operating theatre lights the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness. I had submitted her to an outrageous
injustice while she was resting on a sunbed.

  Could it possibly be a different Agnes Klarström? She had been young then – maybe she had married and acquired a new surname? Her entry in the telephone directory had evidently not indicated if she was Miss, or Mrs, or had any other title.

  It was a scary but also a crucial night. I could no longer run away. I must speak to her, explain what was impossible to explain. And tell her that in so many ways I had also amputated myself.

  I lay awake on top of the bed for a very long time before falling asleep. When I opened my eyes again, it was morning. Jansson would not be delivering any post today. I would be able to cut my way into my hole in the ice without interruption.

  I had to use a crowbar in order to break through the thick ice. My dog sat on the jetty, watching my exertions. The cat had vanished into the boathouse looking for mice. I finally managed to create a big enough hole and stepped down into the burning cold. I thought about Harriet and Louise, and wondered if I would have enough courage today to ring Agnes Klarström and ask her if she was the woman I was looking for.

  I didn’t ring that day. Instead, in a fit of frenzied activity, I gave the house a spring clean, as there was a thick layer of dust everywhere. I managed to start my ancient washing machine and washed my bedlinen, which was so filthy that it could easily have been a homeless tramp who’d been sleeping in my bed. Then I went for a walk round the island, surveyed the icy wastes with my binoculars, and accepted that I must make up my mind what to do next.

  An old woman standing on the ice, a daughter I didn’t know I had in a caravan. At the age of sixty-six I was having to accept that everything I’d thought was definite and done with was starting to change.

  After lunch I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote two letters. One was to Harriet and Louise, and the other to Agnes Klarström. Jansson would be surprised when I handed over two letters. To be on the safe side, I secured them with Sellotape. I wouldn’t put it past him to try to read all my correspondence.

  What did I write? I told Harriet and Louise that my fury had passed. I understood them, but I wasn’t able to see them at the moment. I had returned to my island to look after my abandoned animals. But I took it for granted that we should meet again soon. Our conversations and our social intercourse must continue, obviously.