Italian Shoes

by Henning Mankell

  Aida’s silence was due to her having seen things that no human being, least of all a young child, should ever be exposed to, and consequently she never said anything about her past life. It was as if she was slowly liberating herself from the remains of horrific experiences, and might now be in a position slowly to start on a journey towards a life worth living.

  And so Agnes Klarström now ran her little foster home caring for these three girls, with financial support from various local councils. Lots of people were begging her to open her doors to more girls skulking around in the outer reaches of society. But she refused: in order to provide the help and feeling of security necessary to make a real impact, she needed to keep her activities on a small scale. The girls in her care often ran away, but they nearly always came back again. They stayed with her for a long time, and when they finally left her for good, they always had a new life in store for them. She never took in more than three girls at a time.

  ‘I could have a thousand girls if I wanted,’ she said. ‘A thousand abandoned, wild girls who hate being alone and the feeling of not being welcome wherever they go. My girls realise that without money all you receive is contempt. So they disfigure themselves, they stab people they’ve never met before – but deep down they are screaming in pain from a wound they don’t understand.’

  ‘How come you got involved in all this?’

  She pointed at the arm I had amputated.

  ‘I used to be a swimmer, as you might recall. There must have been something about that in my records. I wasn’t just a hopeful, I really could have become a champion. Won medals. I can say, without bitterness, that my strong point was not my legs, but the strength I had in my arms.’

  A young man with a ponytail marched into the room.

  ‘I’ve told you before that you must knock first,’ she shouted. ‘Out you go! Try again!’

  The young man gave a start, went out, knocked and came in.

  ‘Half right. You must wait until I tell you to come in. What do you want?’

  ‘Aida’s upset. She’s threatening everybody. Mainly me. She says she’s going to strangle Sima.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s just miserable.’

  ‘She’ll have to learn to cope with that. Leave her alone.’

  ‘She wants to speak to you.’

  ‘Tell her I’m coming.’

  ‘She wants you to come now.’

  ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

  The young man left the room.

  ‘He’s not up to it,’ she said with a smile. ‘I think he needs somebody snapping at his heels all the time. But he doesn’t mind my criticising him. After all, I can always blame everything on my arm. He’s come to me thanks to some unemployment benefit scheme or other. His dream is to be in one of those television reality programmes where the participants get to screw each other in front of the cameras. If he can’t manage that, then he hopes to become a presenter. But simply helping my girls seems to be beyond him. I don’t think Mats Karlsson is going to make much of a career for himself in the media.’

  ‘You sound cynical.’

  ‘Not at all. I love my girls, I even love Mats Karlsson. But I’m not doing him a favour by encouraging his flawed dreams, or letting him think that he’s making a positive contribution here. I’m giving him an opportunity to see himself for what he is, and perhaps carve out a meaningful life. Maybe I’m wrong in underestimating him. One day he might have his long hair cut off, and try to make something of his life.’

  She stood up, escorted me out into a lounge and said she would be back shortly. The rock music coming from somewhere upstairs was still excessively loud.

  Melted snow was dripping from the roof outside the windows, songbirds were flitting around like hastily formed shadows.

  I gave a start. Sima had entered the room behind my back, without a sound. This time she wasn’t holding a sword. She sat down on a sofa and tucked her legs underneath herself. But she was on guard the whole time.

  ‘Why were you watching me through your binoculars?’

  ‘You weren’t the one I was looking at.’

  ‘But I saw you. Paedophile!’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I know your type! I know what you’re like.’

  ‘I came here to meet Agnes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s something between us.’

  ‘You fancy her, do you?’

  I was shocked, and blushed.

  ‘I think it’s time to conclude this conversation.’

  ‘What conversation? Answer my question!’

  ‘There’s nothing to answer.’

  Sima looked away, and seemed to have tired of trying to talk to me. I felt offended. The accusation that I was a paedophile was beyond anything I could ever have imagined. I looked furtively at her. She was intent on chewing her fingernails. Her hair seemed to be a mixture of red and black, and was tousled, as if she had combed it while in a temper. Behind that hard exterior, I thought I could discern a very small girl in clothes much too big and black for her.

  Agnes came into the room. Sima immediately withdrew. The lion-tamer had arrived, and the beast had slunk away, I thought. She sat down on the same chair that Sima had occupied, and tucked her legs underneath her, as if she were imitating her foster-daughter.

  ‘Aida is a little girl, and words have suddenly started pouring out of her,’ she said.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing at all. She’s just been reminded of who she is. A big, hopeless nothing, as she puts it. A loser among lots of other losers. If somebody started a Loser Party in Sweden, there’d be no shortage of members to contribute lots of experience. I’m nearly thirty-three years old. What about you?’

  ‘Twice that.’

  ‘Sixty-six. That’s old. Thirty-three isn’t much at all. But it’s enough to realise that there has never been so much tension in this land of ours as there is today. But nobody seems to have noticed. At least, none of the people you might think ought to have their fingers on the pulse. There’s an invisible network of walls in Sweden, and it’s getting worse by the day – dividing people up, increasing the distance between them. Superficially, the opposite might seem to be the case. Get on a tube train in Stockholm and go to the suburbs. It’s not very far in terms of miles, but nevertheless, the distance is enormous. It’s rubbish to talk about entering another world. It’s the same world. But every station on the way out from the city centre is another wall. When you eventually get to the outskirts, it’s up to you if you choose to see the truth of the matter or not.’

  ‘And what is the truth?’

  ‘That what you think is the periphery is in fact the centre, and it’s slowly recreating Sweden. The country is slowly rotating, and outer and inner, near and far, centre and outskirts are changing. My girls exist in a no-man’s-land in which they can see neither backwards nor forwards. Nobody wants them, they are superfluous, rejected. It’s no wonder that every morning when they wake up, the only thing they can be sure about is their own worthlessness, staring them in the face. So they don’t want to wake up! They don’t want to get out of bed! They’ve had bitterness drilled into them since they were five, six years old.’

  ‘Is it really as bad as that?’

  ‘It’s worse.’

  ‘I live on an island. There aren’t any suburbs there, just little skerries and rocks. And there certainly aren’t any screwed-up girls who come running at you wielding a samurai sword.’

  ‘We treat our children so badly that, in the end, they have no means of expression except through violence. That used to apply to boys only. Now we have incredibly tough girl gangs who don’t think twice about inflicting harm on others. We really have reached rock bottom when girls are so desperate that they think their only choice is to behave like the very worst of the gangsters among their boyfriends.’

  ‘Sima called me a paedophile.’

  ‘S
he calls me a whore when the mood takes her. But the worst thing is what she calls herself.’

  ‘What does she say?’

  ‘That she’s dead. Her heart can’t cope. She writes strange poems, and then leaves them on my desk or in my pockets without saying a word. It could well be that ten years from now, she’ll be dead. Either by her own hand or somebody else’s. Or she’ll have an accident, full of drugs or other shit. That’s a highly probable end to the wretched saga of her life. But I can’t give up on her. I know she has an inner strength. If only she can overcome that feeling of uselessness that pursues her everywhere. I have no alternative but to succeed with her. She’s riddled with decay and disillusionment: I have to revitalise her.’

  She stood up.

  ‘I must get on to the police and nag them to put more effort into looking for Miranda. Why don’t you take a walk to the barn, and then we can continue our conversation later?’

  I left the room. Sima was peering out from behind the curtains, following my every move. Several kittens were clambering over the bales of hay in the barn. Horses and cows were in boxes and pens. I recognised vaguely the smell from my very earliest childhood when my grandparents used to keep animals on the island. I stroked the horses’ muzzles, and caressed the cows. Agnes Klarström seemed to have her life under control. What would I have done if a surgeon had done the same to me? Would I have become a bitter wino and rapidly drunk myself to death on a park bench? Or would I have won through? I don’t know.

  Mats Karlsson came into the barn and started feeding the animals with hay. He worked slowly, as if he were being forced to do something he hated doing.

  ‘Agnes asked me to tell you to go back to the house,’ he said suddenly. ‘I forgot to say.’

  I went back inside. Sima was no longer at the window. There was a light breeze, and it had started snowing again. I felt cold and tired. Agnes was standing in the hall, waiting for me.

  ‘Sima’s run away,’ she said.

  ‘But I saw her only a few minutes ago.’

  ‘That was then. She’s disappeared now. In your car.’

  I felt for the car key in my pocket. I knew I had locked the car. As you grow older, you find you have more and more keys in your pocket. Even if you live alone on a remote island in the archipelago.

  ‘I can see that you don’t believe me,’ she said. ‘But I saw the car leaving. And Sima’s jacket is nowhere to be seen. She has a special getaway jacket she always wears when she does a runner. Maybe she believes it has the power to make her invulnerable, invisible. She’s taken that sword with her as well. The stupid girl!’

  ‘But I have the car keys in my pocket.’

  ‘Sima used to have a boyfriend – his name was Filippo – a nice guy from Italy, who taught her all there is to know about opening locked cars and starting engines. He would always steal cars from outside swimming pools or buildings containing illegal casinos. He knew that the car owners would be preoccupied for quite a long time. Only hopeless amateurs steal cars from ordinary car parks.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Sima told me. She trusts me.’

  ‘But nevertheless she steals my car and vanishes.’

  ‘You could interpret that as a sign of trust. She expects us to understand what she’s done.’

  ‘But I want my car back!’

  ‘Sima usually burns out engines. You took a risk in coming here. But you couldn’t know that, of course.’

  ‘I met a man with a dog. He used expressions like “bloody kids”.’

  ‘So do I. What sort of a dog was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was brown and shaggy.’

  ‘Then the man you met was Alexander Bruun. A former swindler who worked in a bank and cheated customers out of their money. He was arrested for fraud, but wasn’t even sent to prison. Now he’s living the life of Riley on all the money he embezzled and the police never found. He hates me, and he hates my girls.’

  She rang the police from her office and explained what had happened. I grew increasingly worried as I listened to what sounded like a cosy chat with a police constable who didn’t seem to think there was anything urgent about catching the runaway who was evidently intent on smashing up my already ailing car.

  She hung up.

  ‘What are they going to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But they have to do something, surely?’

  ‘They haven’t the resources available to start looking for Sima and your car. It will eventually run out of petrol. And so Sima will abandon it and take a train or a bus. Or steal another car. She once came back on a milk float. She always comes back eventually. Most people who run away don’t have any specific destination in mind. Have you never run away?’

  It seemed to me that the only honest answer to that was that I’d been running away for the last twelve years. But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything at all.

  We had dinner at six o’clock. Agnes, Aida, Mats Karlsson and me. Aida had laid places for the two girls who had run away.

  We ate a tasteless fish au gratin. I ate far too quickly, as I was worried about my car. Aida seemed to be inspired by the fact that Sima had run away, and spoke non-stop. Karlsson listened attentively and kept encouraging her, while Agnes ate in silence.

  When we’d finished eating, Aida and Mats cleared away and took care of the washing-up. Agnes and I went out to the barn.

  I apologised to her. I explained as clearly as I could what had gone wrong that fateful day. I spoke slowly and at length, so as not to omit any details. But the fact was that I could have explained what had happened in just a few words. Something had taken place that should never have been possible. Just as an airline pilot has ultimate responsibility and has to ensure that a thorough test of his aeroplane has been done before he takes off, I had a responsibility to ensure that it was the correct arm that had been washed and exposed for amputation: and I had failed in that responsibility.

  We each sat on our bale of hay. She looked hard at me all the time as I talked. When I finished, she stood up and fed the horses with carrots from a sack. Then she came to sit beside me on the bale of hay.

  ‘My God, but how I’ve cursed you!’ she said. ‘You will never be able to understand just how much it means to somebody who loves swimming to be forced to give it up. I used to imagine how I would track you down, and cut off your arm with a very blunt knife. I would wrap you up in barbed wire and dump you in the sea. There’s a limit to how long you can keep hatred going. It can give you a sort of illusory strength, but the fact is that it’s nothing more than an all-consuming parasite. The girls are all that matter now.’

  She squeezed my hand.

  ‘Anyway, that’s enough of that,’ she said. ‘If we go on we’ll only get sentimental. I don’t want that. A person with only one arm can easily get emotional.’

  We went back into the house. Very loud music was coming from Aida’s room. Screeching guitars, thumping bass drums. The walls were vibrating. The mobile phone Agnes had in her pocket rang. She answered, listened, said a few words.

  ‘That was Sima,’ she said. ‘She sends you her greetings.’

  ‘Sends me her greetings? Where is she?’

  ‘She didn’t say. She just wanted Aida to phone her.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you saying anything about her coming back here with my car.’

  ‘I was listening. She did all the talking.’

  Agnes got to her feet and went upstairs. I could hear her shouting to make herself heard through the music. I had found Agnes Klarström, and she hadn’t shouted at me. She hadn’t drowned me in a torrent of accusations. She hadn’t even raised her voice when she described how she wanted to kill me in her dreams.

  I had a lot to think about. Within a few short weeks three women had unexpectedly entered my life. Harriet, Louise and now Agnes. And perhaps I should add Sima, Miranda and Aida.

  Agnes returned. We drank coffee. There was no sign of Mats Karls
son. The rock music continued thudding away.

  The doorbell rang. When Agnes answered it, there were two policemen with a girl I assumed must be Miranda. The officers were holding her arms as if she were dangerous.

  She had one of the most beautiful faces I had ever seen. A Mary Magdalene gripped by Roman soldiers.

  Miranda said nothing, but I gathered from the conversation between Agnes and the police officers that she had been caught by a farmer in the act of trying to steal a calf. Agnes protested indignantly – why on earth would Miranda want to steal a cow? The conversation became more and more heated, the policemen seemed tired, nobody was listening to what the others said, and Miranda just stood there.

  The police left, without it having become clear whether or not the alleged attempt to steal a calf had succeeded. Agnes asked Miranda a few questions in a stern voice. The girl with the beautiful face answered in such a low voice that I couldn’t catch what she said.

  She went upstairs, and the loud music stopped. Agnes sat down on the sofa and examined her fingernails.

  ‘Miranda is a girl I would have loved to have as my own daughter. Of all the girls who have been here, who’ve come and gone, I think she is the one who will do best in life. As long as she discovers that horizon she has inside her.’

  She showed me to a room behind the kitchen, where I could sleep. She left me to it as she had a lot to do in the office. I lay down on the bed and pictured my car in my mind’s eye. Smoke was coming from the engine. Next to Sima in the passenger seat was the newly sharpened sword. What would my grandparents have said if they’d still been alive and I’d tried to tell them about all this? They would never have believed me, never have understood. What would my browbeaten and kicked-around waiter of a father have said? My weeping mother? I switched off the light and lay there in the darkness, surrounded by whispering voices telling me that the twelve years I had spent on my island had robbed me of contact with the world I lived in.