Italian Shoes

by Henning Mankell

  It took a long time to write those few lines. By the time I thought I had written something that might suffice, the kitchen floor was covered in scrunched-up paper. What I had put wasn’t actually true. My fury had not passed, my animals could have survived for a while longer – Jansson could have managed. Nor was I entirely sure that I wanted to meet them again in the near future. I needed time to think things over. Not least to decide what to say to Agnes Klarström, if I could find her.

  The letter to Agnes Klarström did not take long to write. I realised that I had been carrying it around in my head for many years. I just wanted to meet her, that was all. I sent her my address and signed it: she would no doubt never be able to forget that name. I hoped I was writing to the right person.

  When Jansson arrived the following day, it had turned windy. I noted in my logbook that the temperature had fallen during the night, and the squally wind was veering between west and south-west.

  Jansson was on time. I gave him three hundred kronor for collecting me, and insisted that he accepted the payment.

  ‘I’d like you to post these two letters for me,’ I said, handing them to him.

  I had taped all four corners on each of them. He made no attempt to disguise his astonishment that I was holding two letters in my hand.

  ‘I write when I have to. Otherwise not.’

  ‘That picture postcard you sent me was very pretty.’

  ‘A fence covered in snow? What’s pretty about that?’

  I was getting impatient.

  ‘How is the toothache?’ I asked, in an attempt to cover up my irritation.

  ‘It comes and goes. It’s worst up here on the right.’

  Jansson opened his mouth wide.

  ‘I can’t see anything wrong,’ I said. ‘Talk to a dentist.’

  Jansson tried to close his mouth. There was a creaking sound. His jaw locked, and he stood there with his mouth half open. I could see that it was painful. He tried to speak, but it was impossible to understand what he said. I pressed gently with my thumbs on either side of his face, feeling for his jawbone, and massaged until he could close his mouth again.

  ‘That hurt.’

  ‘Try to avoid yawning or opening your mouth too wide for a few days.’

  ‘Is this an indication of some serious illness?’

  ‘Not at all. You don’t need to worry.’

  Jansson drove off with my letters. The wind bit into my face as I walked back to the house.

  That afternoon I opened the door to the ant room. Still more of the tablecloth seemed to have been swallowed up by the constantly growing anthill. But generally speaking, the room and the bed where Harriet had slept were still as they were when we’d left them.

  Days passed and nothing happened. I walked over the ice until I came to the open sea. I measured the thickness of the ice in three different places. I didn’t need to consult my earlier logbooks in order to establish that the ice had never been as thick as this before, for as long as I’d lived on the island.

  I peeped under the tarpaulin and tried to judge if I’d ever be able to put to sea again in my boat. Had it been beached for too long? Would I have the strength and energy to carry out the necessary repairs and spruce it up again? I replaced the tarpaulin without having answered my question.

  One evening the telephone rang. A rare thing. More often than not it would be some telephone company or other urging me to change my supplier, or to install broadband. When they discovered where I lived and that I was an old-age pensioner, they usually lost interest. Besides, I haven’t the slightest idea what broadband is.

  A female voice I didn’t recognise said: ‘Agnes Klarström here. I’ve received your letter.’

  I held my breath. Didn’t say a word.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’

  I said nothing. After further attempts to lure me out of my cave, she hung up.

  So I’d found her. The letter had reached the address it was sent to. She lived near Flen.

  There was an old map of Sweden in one of the kitchen drawers. I think it used to belong to my grandfather. He sometimes used to go on about how he would like to visit Falkenberg before he died. I’ve no idea why he wanted to go there; but he had never been to Stockholm, nor had he ever ventured outside the borders of Sweden. He took his dream of visiting Falkenberg with him to his grave.

  I spread the map out over the table and located Flen. The scale wasn’t big enough for me to pin down Sångledsbyn. It would take me two hours at most to drive there. I had made up my mind: I was going to pay her a visit.

  Two days later I walked across the ice to my car. I hadn’t left a note on my door this time or told Jansson. The dog and the cat had been supplied with sufficient food. The sky was blue, it was dead calm, plus two degrees. I drove north, turned off inland and reached Flen shortly after two in the afternoon. I found a book shop, bought a large-scale map and tracked down Sångledsbyn. It was only a couple of miles away from Harpsund, which is the location of the summer residence of Swedish prime ministers. Once upon a time, a man had lived there who made a fortune out of cork. He had left his home to the state. There was an oak tree in the grounds around which many a visiting foreign statesman, their retinue and their hosts had gathered – not many of the younger generation would ever have heard of them.

  I knew all that about Harpsund because my father had once worked there as a waiter when the then prime minister, Tage Erlander, had been entertaining foreign guests. He never tired of talking about the men – they were all men, no women – sitting around the table conducting important discussions about world politics. This had been during the Cold War; he had made a special effort to move without making a noise, and could recall details of the menu, and the wines. Unfortunately there had also been an incident that came close to causing a scandal. He used to describe it as if he had been party to something top secret, and was chary about revealing any details to me and my mother. One of the guests had become extremely drunk. He had delivered an incomprehensible ‘thank you’ speech at the wrong time, which had caused a bit of a problem for the waiters: but they had saved the day and delayed the serving of the dessert, which had been about to begin. Shortly afterwards the drunken man had been found dead to the world on the lawn at the front of the house.

  ‘Fagerholm got himself drunk in most unfortunate circumstances,’ my father used to say in serious tones.

  My mother and I never discovered who this Fagerholm was. It was only much later on, when my father had died, that I realised he must have been one of the Finnish trade union leaders of the day.

  However, living close to Harpsund now was a woman whose arm I had cut off.

  Sångledsbyn consisted of a few farms spread along the shore of an oval-shaped lake. The fields and meadows were covered in snow. I had taken my binoculars with me and climbed to the top of a hillock in order to get a better overview. People occasionally crossed over the farmyards, between outhouses and barns, or house and garage. None of those I saw could have been Agnes Klarström.

  I gave a start. A dog was sniffing at my feet. A man in a long overcoat and wellington boots was standing on the road below. He shouted for the dog, and raised a hand in greeting. I hid my binoculars in a pocket and went down to the road. We spoke briefly about the view, and the long, dry winter.

  ‘Is there somebody in this village by the name of Agnes Klarström?’ I asked.

  The man pointed at the house furthest away.

  ‘She lives there with her bloody kids,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t used to have a dog until that lot came here. Now everybody has a dog.’

  He shook his head in annoyance, and continued on his way. I didn’t like what I’d heard. I didn’t want to get involved with something that would bring even more disorder into my life. I decided to go home and went back to the car. But something made me stay on even so. I walked through the village until I came to a cart track where the snowplough had been busy. If I went along it, I could approach the rear of the last house thr
ough a clump of trees.

  It was late afternoon, and dusk would soon close in. I made my way along the track and stopped when I came to a spot where I could see the house through the trees. I shook the snow off some branches and created a good view. The house was obviously well looked after. A car was parked outside, with the cable from an engine heater trailing through the snow to an electric socket in the wall.

  Suddenly a young girl appeared. She was looking straight at me and my binoculars. She produced something that had been hidden behind her back. It appeared to be a sword. She started running straight at me with the sword raised above her head.

  I dropped my binoculars and fled. I stumbled over a tree root or a large stone and fell down. Before I could get to my feet, the girl with the sword had caught up with me.

  She was glaring at me with hatred in her eyes.

  ‘Perverts like you,’ she said, ‘they’re everywhere. Peeping Toms skulking in the bushes with their binoculars.’

  A woman came running after her. She stopped by the girl and snatched away the sword with her left and only hand – and I realised it must be Agnes Klarström. Perhaps, hidden away at the back of my subconscious mind, there was an image of the young girl from twelve years ago who had lain in the sunbed position in front of my well-scrubbed hands in their rubber gloves.

  She was wearing a blue jacket, zipped up to her neck. The empty right sleeve was fastened to her shoulder with a safety pin. The girl by her side was eyeing me with contempt.

  I wished Jansson could have come to rescue me. For the second time recently the ice under my feet had given way, and I was drifting without being able to clamber ashore.

  CHAPTER 6

  I STOOD UP, brushed off the snow and explained who I was. The girl started kicking out at me, but Agnes snapped at her and she slunk away.

  ‘I don’t need a guard dog,’ said Agnes. ‘Sima sees absolutely everything that’s going on, everybody who approaches the house. She has the eyes of a hawk.’

  ‘I thought she was going to kill me.’

  Agnes eyed me up and down, but didn’t respond.

  We went into the house and sat down in her office. Somewhere in the background rock music was blaring out at top volume. Agnes seemed not to hear. When she took off her jacket, she did it just as quickly as if she’d had two arms and two hands.

  I sat down on a visitor chair. Her desk was empty. Apart from a pen: nothing else.

  ‘How do you think I reacted when I received your letter?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose you must have been surprised. Perhaps furious?’

  ‘I was relieved. At last, I thought! But then I wondered: Why just now? Why not yesterday, or ten years ago?’

  She leaned back in her chair. She had long, brown hair, a simple hairslide, bright blue eyes. She gave the impression of being strong, decisive.

  She had placed the samurai sword on a shelf next to the window. She noticed me looking at it.

  ‘I was once given it by a man who was in love with me. When we fell out of love, for some strange reason he took the scabbard with him, but left this incredibly sharp sword with me. Maybe he hoped I would use it to split open my stomach in desperation after he’d left me?’

  She spoke quickly, as if time was short. I told her about Harriet and Louise, and how I now felt duty-bound to track her down, and find out if she was still alive.

  ‘Did you hope I wouldn’t be? That I’d died?’

  ‘There was a time when I did. But not any more.’

  The telephone rang. She answered, listened to what was said, than replied briefly but firmly. There were no empty places in her home for errant girls. She already had three teenagers to look after.

  I entered a world I knew nothing about. Agnes Klarström ran a foster home where she lived with three teenage girls who, in my day, would have been classified as tearaways. The girl Sima came from one of Gothenburg’s sink estates. It wasn’t possible to say for certain how old she was. She had come to Sweden as a lone refugee, hidden in a long-distance lorry via the southern port of Trelleborg. During her journey from Iran, she had been advised to dump all her identification papers the moment she set foot on Swedish soil, change her name and lose all traces of her original identity to avoid deportation should she be caught. All she had was a slip of paper with the three Swedish words it was assumed she needed to know.

  Refugee, persecuted, alone.

  When the lorry eventually stopped outside Sturup airport, the driver pointed to the terminal building and said she should go there and look for a police station. She was eleven or twelve at the time; now she was about seventeen, and the life she had led in Sweden meant that she only felt safe with the samurai sword in her hands.

  One of the other girls in the household had run away two days ago. There was no fence round the property, no locked doors. Nevertheless, anybody who left was regarded as a runaway. If it happened too often, Agnes would eventually lose patience. When found, the girl in question would be faced with a new home where the gates would be substantial and the keyrings large.

  The runaway, an African from Chad, called Miranda, had probably gone to stay with one of her friends who, for some reason, was called Teabag. Miranda was sixteen and had come to Sweden with her family as a refugee, as part of a UN quota.

  Her father was a simple man, a carpenter by trade and very religious, who had soon buckled in the face of the endless cold weather and the feeling that nothing had turned out as he had hoped. He had locked himself into the smallest of the three rooms in which the large family lived, a room with no furniture, only a small pile of African sand that had been in their battered suitcases when they arrived in their new homeland. His wife used to place a tray with food and drink outside the door three times a day. During the night, when everybody else was asleep, he would go to the bathroom, and perhaps also go out for lonely walks around town. At least, they assumed he did, because they would sometimes find wet footprints on the floor when they woke up the next morning.

  Miranda eventually found this too much to bear, and one evening she had simply left, perhaps hoping to go back to where she came from. The new homeland had turned out to be a dead end. Before long she was being picked up by the police for petty theft and shoplifting and ended up being shunted around from one penal institution to another.

  And now she had run away. Agnes Klarström was furious, but was determined not to rest until the police had made a determined effort to find her and bring her back.

  There was a photograph of Miranda pinned up on the wall. The girl’s hair was plaited and arranged artistically, clinging to her skull.

  ‘If you look carefully, you notice that she has plaited in the word “fuck” next to her left temple,’ said Agnes.

  I could see that she was right.

  There was also a third girl in the foster home that was Agnes Klarström’s mission and source of income. She was the youngest of the three, only fourteen, and a skinny creature reminiscent of a timid caged animal. Agnes knew next to nothing about her. She was a bit like the child in the old folk tale who suddenly finds herself standing in a town square, having forgotten her name and where she came from.

  Late one evening two years previously, an official at the railway station in Skövde had been about to close down for the night when he found her sitting on a bench. He told her to leave, but she didn’t seem to understand. All she could do was hold up a piece of paper on which it said ‘Train to Karlsborg’, and he began to wonder which of the pair of them was going mad, as there hadn’t been a train from Skövde to Karlsborg for the last fifteen years.

  A few days later she started appearing on newspaper placards as ‘The Railway Child in Skövde’. Nobody seemed to recognise her, although there were pictures of her wherever you looked. She didn’t have a name, psychologists examined her, interpreters who spoke every language under the sun tried to get her to say something, but nobody had any idea where she came from. The only clue to her past was the myste
rious slip of paper with the words ‘Train to Karlsborg’. They turned the little town of Karlsborg on the shores of Lake Vättern inside out, but nobody recognised her and nobody could understand why she had been waiting for a train that stopped running fifteen years ago. An evening newspaper had conducted a poll of its readers and given her the name Aida. She was given Swedish citizenship and a personal identity number after doctors agreed that she must be about twelve years old, thirteen at most. Because of her thick, black hair and olive-coloured skin, it was assumed that she came from somewhere in the Middle East.

  Aida didn’t speak a word for two years. Only when every other possibility had been exhausted and Agnes Klarström took her in was any progress made. One morning Aida came to the breakfast table and sat down. Agnes had been talking to her ever since she’d arrived, trying to stir up some reaction in Aida, and now she asked in a friendly tone what she would like.

  ‘Porridge,’ she said in almost perfect Swedish.

  After that, she started talking. The psychologists who came flocking round assumed that she had picked up the language by listening to everything said by all those trying to make her speak. A significant fact supporting this theory was that Aida knew and understood a large number of psychological and medical terms that would otherwise hardly be normal vocabulary for a girl of her age.

  She talked, but she had nothing at all to say about who she was, or what she was supposed to do in Karlsborg. Whenever anybody asked her what her name was, she replied as one might have expected:

  ‘I’m called Aida.’

  She appeared on all the newspaper placards again. There were voices muttering in dark corners, suggesting that she had fooled everybody and that her silence had been a smokescreen to overcome all resistance and guarantee her full citizenship in Sweden. But Agnes thought there was a different explanation. The very first time they had met, Aida had stared at her amputated arm. It was as if the sight of it rang a bell with her, as if she had been swimming in deep water for years, but had now finally reached the shallows where she could stand up. Perhaps Agnes’s stump signified something Aida recognised and made her feel secure. Perhaps she had seen people having limbs chopped off. Those doing the chopping were her enemies, and those on the receiving end were the only people she could trust.