The Man Who Smiled

by Henning Mankell

  His doctor, who gave him regular checkups, forbade him any more such trips as there was a real danger that Wallander would drink himself to death. But two months later, at the beginning of December, he was off again, having borrowed money from his father on the pretext of buying some new furniture in order to raise his spirits. Ever since his troubles started he had avoided his father, who had just married a woman many years his junior who used to be his home help. The moment he had the money in his hand, he made a beeline for the Ystad Travel Agency and bought a three-week vacation in Thailand. The pattern of the Caribbean repeated itself, the difference being that catastrophe was narrowly averted because a retired pharmacist who sat next to him on the flight and who happened to be at the same hotel took pity on him and stepped in when Wallander began drinking at breakfast and generally acting strangely. The pharmacist’s intervention resulted in Wallander being sent home a week earlier than planned. On this holiday, too, he had surrendered to his self-disgust and thrown himself into the arms of prostitutes, each one younger than the last. There followed a nightmarish winter when he was in constant dread of having contracted the fatal disease.

  By the end of April, when he had been away from work for ten months, it was confirmed that he was not in fact infected; but he seemed not to react to the good news. That was about the time his doctor began to wonder if Wallander’s days as a police officer were over, whether indeed he would ever be well enough to work again, or was ready for immediate early retirement for health reasons.

  That was when he went—perhaps “ran away” would be more accurate—to Skagen the first time. By then he had managed to stop drinking, thanks not least to his daughter Linda coming back from Italy and discovering the mess both he and his apartment were in. She had reacted in exactly the right way: emptied all the bottles scattered around the apartment and read him the riot act. For the two weeks she stayed with him on Mariagatan, he at last had somebody to talk to. Together they were able to lance most of the abscesses eating into his soul, and by the time she left she felt that she might be able to give a little credence to his promise to stay off the booze. On his own again and unable to face the prospect of sitting around the empty apartment, he had seen an advertisement in the newspaper for an inexpensive guesthouse in Skagen.

  Many years before, soon after Linda was born, he had spent a few weeks in the summer at Skagen with his wife Mona. They had been among the happiest weeks of his life. They were short of money and lived in a tent that leaked, but it seemed to them that the whole universe was theirs. He telephoned that very day and booked himself a room starting in the first week of May.

  The landlady was a widow, Polish originally, and she left him to his own devices. She lent him a bicycle. Every morning he went riding along the endless sands. He took a plastic shopping bag with a packed lunch, and did not come back to his room until late in the evening. His fellow guests were elderly, singles and couples, and it was as quiet as a library reading room. For the first time in over a year he was sleeping soundly, and he had the feeling his insides were shedding the effects of his heavy drinking.

  During that first stay at the guesthouse in Skagen he wrote three letters. The first was to his sister Kristina. She had often been in contact during the past year, asking how he was. He had been touched by her concern, but he had hardly been able to bring himself to write to her, or to telephone. Things were made worse by a vague memory of having sent her a garbled postcard from the Caribbean when he was far from sober. She had never mentioned it, he had never asked; he hoped he had been so drunk that he had gotten the address wrong, or forgotten to put a stamp on the card. Now he sat in bed one night and wrote to her, resting the paper on his briefcase. He tried to describe the feeling of emptiness, of shame and guilt that had dogged him ever since he had killed a man last year. He had unquestionably acted in self-defense, and not even the most aggressive and police-hating of reporters had taken him to task, but he felt that he would never manage to shake off the burden of guilt. His only hope was that he might one day learn to live with it.

  “I feel as if part of my soul has been replaced by an artificial limb,” he wrote. “It still doesn’t do what I want it to do. Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I’m afraid it might never again obey me, but I haven’t given up hope altogether.”

  The second letter was to his colleagues at the police station in Ystad, and by the time he was about to put it in the red mailbox outside the post office in Skagen, he realized that a good part of what he had written was untrue, but that he had to send it even so. He thanked them for the hi-fi system they had pooled together to give him last summer, and asked them to forgive his not having done so earlier. He meant all that sincerely, of course. But when he ended the letter by saying he was getting better and hoped to be back at work soon, those were just meaningless words: the polar opposite was nearer the truth.

  The third letter he wrote during that stay in Skagen was to Baiba Liepa. He had written to her every other month or so over the past year, and she had replied every time. He had begun to think of her as his private patron saint, and his fear of upsetting her so that she might stop replying led him to suppress his feelings for her. Or at least he thought he had. The long, drawn-out process of being undermined by inertia had made him unsure of anything anymore. He had brief interludes of absolute clarity, usually when he was on the beach or sitting among the dunes sheltering him from the biting cold winds blowing off the sea, and it sometimes seemed to him the whole thing was pointless. He had met Baiba for only a few days in Riga. She had been in love with her murdered husband, Karlis, a captain in the Latvian police force—why in God’s name should she suddenly transfer her affections to a Swedish police officer who had done no more than was demanded of him by his profession, even if it had happened in a somewhat unorthodox fashion? But he had no great difficulty dismissing those moments of insight. It was as if he did not dare risk losing what deep down he knew was something he did not even have. Baiba, his dream of Baiba, was his last line of defense. He would defend it to the bitter end, even if it was only an illusion.

  He stayed ten days at the guesthouse, and when he went back to Ystad he had already made up his mind to return as soon as he could. By mid-July he was in his old room again. Again the widow lent him a bicycle and he spent his days by the sea. Unlike the first time, the beach was now full of tourists, and he felt as if he was wandering like an invisible shadow among all these people as they laughed, played, and paddled. It was as if he had established a territory on the beach where the two seas met, an area under his personal control invisible to everyone else, where he could patrol and keep an eye on himself as he tried to find a way out of his misery. His doctor thought he could detect some improvement in Wallander after his first spell in Skagen, but the indications were still too weak for him to assert that there had been a definite change for the better. Wallander asked if he could stop taking the medication he had been on for more than a year, since it made him feel tired and sluggish, but the doctor urged him to be patient for a little longer.

  Every morning he wondered if he would have the strength to get out of bed, but it was easier when he was at the guesthouse in Skagen. There were moments when he felt he could forget the awful events of the previous year, and there were glimmerings of hope that he might after all have a future.

  As he wandered the beach for hour after hour, he began slowly to go through what lay behind it all, searching for a way to overcome and cast off the burden, maybe even to find the strength to become a police officer again, a police officer and a human being.

  It was during that visit that he had stopped listening to opera. He would often take his little cassette player on his walks along the beach, but one day it came to him that he had had enough. When he got back to the guesthouse that evening he packed all his opera cassettes away in his suitcase and put it in the closet. The next day he bicycled into Skagen and bought some recordings of pop artists he had barely heard of. What surprised him most was th
at he did not miss the music that had kept him going for so many years.

  I have no space left, he thought. Something inside me has filled up to the brim, and soon the walls will burst.

  He was back in Skagen in the middle of October. He was firmly resolved this time to work out what he would do with the rest of his life. His doctor had encouraged him to return to the guesthouse, which obviously did his patient good. There were signs of a gradual return to health, a tentative withdrawal from the depths of depression. Without betraying his oath of confidentiality, he also intimated to Björk, Wallander’s boss, that there might just possibly be a chance of the invalid coming back to work at some point.

  So Wallander went to Denmark again and set out once more on his walks along the beach. It was late autumn and the sands were deserted. He seldom encountered another human being, and the ones he did see were mostly old, apart from the occasional sweat-stained jogger; and there was a busybody regularly walking her dog. He resumed his patrols, watching over his lonely territory, marching with gathering confidence toward the just visible and constantly shifting line where the beach met the sea.

  He was well into middle age now, and the milestone of fifty was not far off. During the last year he had lost so much weight he found himself having to hunt in his closet for clothes he had been unable to get into for the past seven or eight years. He was in better physical shape than he had enjoyed for ages, especially now that he had stopped drinking. That seemed to him a possible starting point for his future plans. Barring accidents, he could have at least twenty more years to live. What exercised him most was whether he would be able to return to police duties, or whether he would have to find something else to do. He refused even to consider early retirement for health reasons. That was a prospect he didn’t think he could cope with. He spent his time on the beach, usually enveloped in drifting fog but with occasional days of fresh, clear air, glittering seas and gulls soaring up above. Sometimes he felt like the clockwork man who had lost the key that normally stuck out of his back, and hence lacked the possibility of being wound up, of finding new sources of energy. He pondered his options were he forced to leave the police force. He might become a security guard or the like with some firm or other. He could not see what his service as a police officer actually qualified him for, apart from chasing criminals. His options were limited, unless he decided to make a clean break and put behind him his many years of police work. But who would be willing to employ a former officer approaching fifty, whose only expertise was unraveling more or less confused crime scenes?

  When he felt hungry he would leave the beach and find a sheltered spot in the dunes. He tucked into his packed lunch and used the plastic shopping bag to sit on, protecting himself from the cold sand. As he ate, he tried hard—without much success—to think of something other than his future. He made every effort to be realistic, but always he had to fend off unrealistic dreams.

  Like all other police officers, he was sometimes tempted to go over to the other side. He never ceased to be amazed by the officers who had turned into criminals and yet failed to use their knowledge of fundamental police procedures that would have helped them to avoid being caught. He often toyed with schemes which would instantly make him rich and independent, but usually it did not take long to come to his senses and banish any such thoughts with a shudder. What he wanted least of all was to follow in the steps of his colleague Hanson, who seemed to him obsessed, spending so much of his time betting on horses that hardly ever won. Wallander could not imagine himself ever wasting time like that.

  He kept coming back to the question of whether he was duty-bound to return to the police force. Start work again, fight off the memories of what happened a year ago, and maybe one day manage to live with them. The only realistic option was for him to go on as before. That was the nearest he came to finding a glimmer of a meaning in life: helping people to lead as secure an existence as possible, removing the worst criminals from the streets. To give up on that would not only mean turning his back on a job he knew he did well—perhaps better than most of his colleagues—it would also mean undermining something deep inside him, the feeling of being a part of something greater than himself, something that made his life worth living.

  But eventually, when he had been in Skagen a week, and autumn was showing signs of turning into winter, he was forced to admit that he would not now be up to the job. His career as a police officer was over; the wounds inflicted by what happened the previous year had changed him irrevocably. It was an afternoon when the beach was shrouded in thick fog when he decided that the arguments for and against were exhausted. He would talk to his doctor and to Björk. He would not return to duty.

  Deep down he felt a vague sense of relief. Now at least he knew the score. The man he had killed last year in the field with all the sheep hidden in the fog had his revenge.

  He bicycled into Skagen that night and got drunk in a little smoke-filled bar where the customers were few and far between and the music too loud. He knew that for once he would not be carrying on his binge the next day. This was merely a way of confirming the fateful conclusion he had reached, that his life as a policeman had come to an end. Riding back to the guesthouse in the dead of night, he fell off and grazed his cheek. The landlady had noticed his absence and was waiting up for him. Despite his protests, she insisted on cleaning the blood off his face and on taking his filthy clothes to wash. Then she helped him unlock the door of his room.

  “There was a man here this evening, asking for Mr. Wallander,” she said, handing him back the key.

  He looked blankly at her.

  “Nobody asks for me,” he said. “Nobody even knows I’m here.”

  “This man did,” she said. “He was anxious to find you.”

  “Did he give you his name?”

  “No, but he was Swedish.”

  Wallander shook his head and tried to put it out of his mind. He did not want to see anybody, and nobody wanted to see him either, he was sure of that.

  The next day he was full of regrets and went back to the beach, never giving a thought to what the landlady had told him. The fog was thick, and he felt very tired. For the first time he asked himself what he thought he was doing on the beach. After only a kilometer or so he wondered if he had the strength to go on, and sat down on the upturned hulk of a large rowboat half-buried in the sand.

  It was then that he noticed a man approaching through the fog. It was as if somebody had intruded on the privacy of his office out there on the boundless sands.

  His first impression was of a blurred stranger, wearing a windbreaker and a cap that seemed too small for his head. Then he seemed vaguely familiar, but it was not until he had come closer and Wallander had stood up that he realized who it was. They shook hands, and Wallander wondered how on earth his refuge had been discovered. He tried to remember when he had last seen Sten Torstensson, and thought that it must have been in connection with some court proceedings that last fateful spring.

  “I came to see you last night at the guesthouse,” Torstensson said. “I don’t want to disturb you, of course, but I must talk to you.”

  Once upon a time I was a police officer and he was a lawyer, Wallander thought, that’s all there was to it. We used to sit on either side of criminals, and occasionally but not very often we might argue about whether or not an arrest was justified. We got to know each other a bit better during the difficult period of my divorce from Mona, when he took care of my interests. One day we realized something had clicked, something that might be the beginnings of a friendship. Friendship often develops out of a meeting at which nobody had expected any such miracle to happen. But friendship is a miracle, that’s something life has taught me. He invited me out sailing one weekend. It was blowing a gale, and I vowed I would never set foot on a sail-boat again. Then we started meeting, not all that often, not regularly. And now he’s tracked me down and wants to talk.

  “I heard that somebody had been asking for me,” Wa
llander said. “How the hell did you find me here?”

  He knew he was making it clear he resented being disturbed in his refuge among the dunes.

  “You know me,” Torstensson said, “I’m not the sort to make a nuisance of myself. My secretary claims I’m sometimes frightened of being a nuisance to myself, whatever she means by that. But I phoned your sister in Stockholm. Or rather, I got in touch with your father and he gave me her number. She knew the name of the guesthouse, and where it was. And so here I am. I stayed the night at the hotel next to the art museum.”

  They had started walking along the beach, the wind behind them. The woman who was always out with her dog had stopped and was staring at them, and Wallander was sure she would be surprised to see he had a visitor. They walked in silence, and Wallander waited for Torstensson to speak, feeling how odd it was to have someone by his side.

  “I need your help,” Torstensson said, eventually. “As a friend and as a police officer.”

  “As a friend,” Wallander said. “If I can. Which I doubt. But not as a police officer.”

  “I know you’re still on a break from work,” Torstensson said.

  “Not only that. You can be the first to know that I’m quitting altogether.”