‘I’m alive,’ she wrote. That was the most important thing. ‘I’m alive.’ She repeated those words on almost every other line. The whole letter was a sort of long request to be taken at her word. She was alive, she wasn’t dead as Captain Svartman had thought. She had gone ashore because she was devastated by grief, and then stayed there when the ship continued its voyage to Australia. But she would soon be coming home. And she was alive. That was the most important thing of all: she was still alive.
That was the letter she wanted to write to Elin. And she repeated the same words, albeit in less emotional style, in the other two letters she wrote that day. One was to Forsman, the other to Berta. She was alive, and she would soon be coming home again.
Eventually the three letters lay on the desk in front of her, meticulously fitted into envelopes that she carefully sealed with the names of the recipients written as neatly as she could possibly manage. She and Berta had taught themselves to read and write – with difficulty, but even so it was an important step away from poverty: she still found it difficult to write, and was unsure about spelling and word order. But she didn’t bother about that. The letter to Elin would be the most important message she had ever received in her life. One of her daughters had returned from the dead.
In the afternoon she summoned Andrade’s car and was driven to the harbour. She had put on her best clothes, and spent an age in front of the big mirror in the hall next to the front door. On the way to the harbour she suddenly had an idea, and asked the chauffeur to make a detour and stop outside Picard’s photographic studio. Picard was a Frenchman who had established himself in Lourenço Marques as early as the beginning of the 1890s. His studio was used by the town’s wealthy inhabitants. His face had been disfigured by a shell splinter that had hit him during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Although his face was repugnant, his friendliness and his photographic skills endeared him to everybody. But he refused to take pictures of black people, unless they were in the role of servants or bearers, or simply made up the background behind the white people who were being portrayed.
Picard bowed and informed her that he could take her photograph immediately – a couple had just cancelled their slot because their engagement had been broken off. Hanna wanted to be photographed standing up, wearing her big hat, her long gloves, and with her furled parasol by her side.
Picard asked respectfully who the picture was for. He knew exactly who she was, and about her short marriage to Senhor Vaz. Hanna also knew that for some unknown reason Picard had always patronized a rival establishment when he made his regular brothel visits.
‘The photograph is for my mother,’ she said.
‘I see,’ said Picard. ‘So we want a dignified picture. One showing that all is well on the African continent, and that you are leading a life that has brought you success and riches.’
He placed her next to a large mirror and a chair with beautiful arms. He moved a flower arrangement standing on a small table out of the composition after having tried it but found it unsuitable. Then he took the photograph and promised to develop it immediately and make three copies. Hanna paid him twice as much as he asked for. They agreed that the black messenger boy would deliver the photographs to Captain Svartman’s ship the moment they were dry.
When she reached the harbour she found Captain Svartman standing on the gangplank, waiting for her. Hanna noted that his uniform had been newly brushed down and his peaked cap polished. She walked up the gangplank, and for a brief, dizzy moment recalled the emotions she had felt when she left the ship. Some crewmen were busy splicing ropes, others were repairing a cargo hatch. She couldn’t see anybody she recognized. The captain realized that she was looking for a familiar face.
‘The crew is completely new,’ he said. ‘After Lundmark’s death rumours started to spread suggesting that I was an unlucky captain. Peltonen’s disappearance didn’t help matters. But my new crew is very competent. As captain I can’t go around wishing that earlier crew members were back on board again. I sail with the living, not the dead.’
He took her to his cabin. On the way there she saw the new cook coming out of the galley, a young man with blond hair.
‘An Estonian,’ said the captain. ‘He usually makes pretty good food. He’s quiet and clean.’
They sat down in the cabin and were served tea by a nervous-seeming boy in a white jacket. Hanna noticed that the potted plants in the brass-framed portholes were well looked after.
‘I must know what you said to Jonathan Forsman.’
Svartman nodded. He’d been expecting that question.
‘All I could tell him were the facts as I knew them. That you had disappeared during our stop at the last port before the final lap to Australia. That we spent a whole day looking for you, but were then forced to continue our voyage. And that I didn’t know what had happened to you. Either you were alive, or you were dead: I had no idea which.’
‘What did Forsman say?’
‘He was upset. Shaking. I was afraid he might get into such a state that he had a heart attack. It wasn’t me he was directing his anger at, but Fate. The fact that you hadn’t come back. I think he felt a heavy responsibility.’
‘Do you know what he told my mother?’
The captain shook his head.
‘I assume he tried to give her courage and hope, but I suspect she must have thought that her daughter was dead and buried in a foreign country.’
Hanna felt a lump in her throat, and tears gathering behind her eyes. But she didn’t want to start crying in front of the captain. She tried to keep a firm grip on herself so as not to break down.
They drank the tea that the boy had poured into their cups, his hand trembling. Hanna recognized the crockery from her time on board.
‘This accursed continent!’ said the captain out of the blue. ‘I’m trying to understand how it’s been possible for you to live here so long.’
‘Not everything is bad,’ she said. ‘The heat can be difficult, but most of the time it’s pleasant. There’s no such thing as cold here. I’ve tried to explain to black people what snow is – like ice, but at the same time as light as a chicken feather falling down from the sky. It’s not possible to make them understand.’
‘But what about the people? The blacks? I shudder when I see how they live.’
‘I don’t know much about that. They live their own lives outside town. In the mornings they come wandering in out of the sun to work as servants or miners. Then they disappear again.’
‘I hear a lot of talk about violence and robbery. We always post extra guards by the gangplank when we are berthed in African harbours. Other captains have told me about thieves who swim to the ship and climb on board.’
‘I haven’t come across anything of that kind all the time I’ve been living here. The blacks are not like us, but I don’t know if they are dangerous. I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘Can they be trusted?’
‘No,’ said Hanna, mostly because that was obviously what the captain wanted to hear. She suddenly realized that she simply didn’t know what she really thought.
The captain studied his hands without speaking.
‘It doesn’t happen very often,’ he said eventually. ‘My visits to those black women.’
‘Of course not,’ said Hanna. ‘I’ve already forgotten it was there we happened to meet.’
The captain seemed relieved. Hanna immediately cashed in on her reward for being so understanding.
‘I only went to the brothel to find out why the cashier hadn’t been to see me the evening before. I never go there otherwise. I do the work I need to do at a safe distance. I live in a stone-built house that is not much smaller than Jonathan Forsman’s.’
The captain nodded. Hanna could see that he was impressed by what she had to say, although he wasn’t totally convinced that it was true. We don’t trust each other, she thought. But we did when we were working together on the boat.
She suddenly had t
he feeling that she wanted to get away from the ship as quickly as possible. And so she put the three letters on the little table that was screwed down on to the floor.
‘Three copies of a photograph are on their way,’ she said. ‘A messenger boy will bring them to the ship shortly. I want Forsman and Berta to have a copy, and the third one should be sent to my mother.’
She opened her purse and took out several high-value Portuguese banknotes. Svartman declined to accept them. Hanna couldn’t help wondering what currency he had used to pay Felicia for her services. She felt uncomfortable when the image of the naked captain lying on top of Felicia’s attractive body appeared in her mind’s eye.
He accompanied her out on to the deck.
‘I’ll be going back to Sweden soon,’ she said. ‘Other Swedish ships call in here from time to time, but I can’t possibly leave just now. I’ve accepted responsibility for the brothel for as long as the owner is ill, so I can’t leave this town until she’s fit again.’
‘Of course not,’ said the captain.
He doesn’t believe me, Hanna thought. Or at least, he doesn’t believe what I say. Why should he, after all?
They walked around the ship, and took a good look at the Norwegian forest cat that had come on board in Sundsvall and was now curled up fast asleep down at the bottom of a large coil of hawser.
‘How about Berta?’ Hanna asked apropos of nothing. ‘Is she still at Forsman’s place?’
‘She’s had a baby,’ said the captain. ‘I don’t know who the father is, but Forsman has allowed her to stay on in his house.’
Hanna immediately assumed that Forsman himself was the father of the child. Otherwise he would never have allowed Berta to stay.
Berta’s loneliness, she thought. And mine. Is there really any difference between them?
A black man came running along the quay. He had a packet in his hand. It contained the photographs from Picard. The captain and Hanna opened the envelope. The black and white picture was a true image of what she looked like, she realized. A woman, still very young, looking frankly and unhesitatingly straight at the camera.
‘Both Forsman and your mother will be very pleased,’ said the captain. ‘Forsman will probably be extremely relieved to discover that you are alive.’
He had one last question for her before they took leave of each other by the gangplank.
‘Where shall I tell them you are working?’
‘At a hotel,’ she said. ‘The Paradise Hotel.’
They shook hands. She didn’t look back after leaving the ship.
The following day when she returned to the harbour, the ship had left.
52
AFEW DAYS LATER. The sea was calm, no cooling breezes were blowing along the dusty streets.
One night Hanna woke up, feeling as if somebody had hit her. Carlos had shouted out from his perch on the ceiling light, then jumped down on to the bed. Hanna knew that monkeys screamed in a special way when they were warning others in the troop about a snake or some other danger they had become aware of. She lit the paraffin lamp next to her bed. When it radiated its flickering light around the room, Carlos seemed to calm down immediately. She thought he must have had a nightmare, something she had suspected on previous occasions when he had started whimpering restlessly in bed, and the following day seemed to be gloomily introspective and preoccupied.
But something was still worrying him. He had climbed up on to the window ledge and was now sitting behind the curtain. When Hanna opened it she found herself looking straight out into the brief tropical dawn – but she could also see smoke and flames rising from a block not far from the brothel. When she opened the window she could also hear shouts and screams in the distance. Carlos climbed out on to the roof, and didn’t come back despite her calling for him.
She aimed her binoculars at the centre of the blaze. The dawn light was still only faint, but she could see right away that it was no ordinary fire. Black men were running around with cudgels and bows and arrows in their hands. They were throwing stones and burning bundles of twigs at the soldiers from the Portuguese garrison who had assembled there. Hanna could see bodies lying in the street, but she couldn’t make out if they were black or white.
She put down the binoculars and tried to work out what was happening. Then she pulled the bell cord – hard, so that there should be no doubt about her wanting a servant to come to her room without delay, despite the fact that all of them except Anaka were bound to be still asleep.
In fact it was Julietta who came, half-dressed and unkempt, but Hanna could see immediately that she was wide awake. Presumably the others in the house had also realized what was happening down below in the town, and told the youngest of them to answer the bell.
Hanna took Julietta out on to the veranda with her.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘People are angry.’
‘Who’s angry?’
‘We are angry.’
As Julietta said those last words, she also did something out of the ordinary. She looked Hanna in the eye. It was as if she had been stung, Hanna thought. What’s going on in the street down below evidently concerns me as well.
‘Why are you angry?’ Hanna asked. ‘Please tell me without me having to drag it out of you.’
‘A white man broke a woman’s water pitcher.’
Hanna was irritated by the answer, which didn’t give her any understandable context. She angrily told Julietta to go and fetch Anaka. When Anaka arrived, she was if anything even more laconic than Julietta.
Hanna got dressed and thought it was lucky that she was expecting a visit from Andrade that morning, with some papers for her to sign. Nobody knew more than he did about what went on in town, whether it happened openly or on the sly. As she was having breakfast, waiting for his arrival, she occasionally went out on to the veranda and took another look through her binoculars. The fire was still burning, and it seemed as if new ones had been started, although they were hidden behind buildings and out of range of the binoculars. She could hear distant shouting and the rattle of gunfire. Carlos was sitting motionless on the roof, following the action.
When Andrade arrived he was red in the face and more agitated than she had ever seen him before. She noted that he had been impolite to her servants, and that he slammed a revolver on to the coffee table before sitting down. Before she had time to ask him any questions, he started to explain what had happened that morning. The sudden uprising had begun a few hours earlier when a group of black men had come marching in from the slums. They had carefully avoided the streets that were usually patrolled by Portuguese soldiers ensuring that the night curfew was observed. Once they had reached the centre of town they had run to a police station and set it on fire by throwing bottles full of paraffin through the windows. The half-asleep soldiers had started shooting the rioters, and then bloody chaos had taken hold.
‘So it’s an uprising,’ said Hanna. ‘There must be a reason for it.’
‘Must there?’ asked Andrade ironically. ‘These black savages need no reason other than their inherited bloodthirstiness to start a riot that can only lead to their own destruction.’
Hanna found it difficult to believe him. It surely couldn’t be as simple as he suggested. As early as the day when Captain Svartman’s ship had docked in Lourenço Marques, she had thought she could detect hostility and sadness in the eyes of the blacks. She was living in a sad continent where the only ones who laughed – often far too loudly – were the white people. But she was well aware that the laughter was usually no more than a way of disguising apprehension that could easily grow into fear. A fear of darkness, of the people who lived in darkness but couldn’t be seen.
Hanna insisted. Something must have triggered the fury of the blacks. Andrade shrugged impatiently.
‘No doubt somebody thought he had been treated unfairly and thought it was necessary to die if needs be in order to avenge the perceived injustice. But it will soon pass. If the
re’s one thing I know about these black people, it’s that they are cowards. They run away like terrified dogs when things get serious.’
He picked up the revolver from the table.
‘To be honest I would prefer our meeting to be postponed until tomorrow morning. Calm will have been restored by then, the worst of the troublemakers will be dead and the others will be locked up in the fort. What I feel I must do now is go down to where the fires are burning. I belong to the town’s civil militia who have been trained to stand shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers whenever there is a threat to our safety. I can certainly be of some use with the aid of this revolver.’
There was something jubilant in Andrade’s voice that scared Hanna. But at the same time she wanted to find out what was actually happening close to her brothel.
‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, standing up. ‘This is naturally more important than the papers I’m supposed to sign.’
‘From the point of view of safety it might be better for you to stay here,’ said Andrade. ‘Niggers running amok are dangerous.’
‘I have the brothel to look after,’ said Hanna. ‘I’m responsible for my employees.’
She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, put on the hat with the peacock feather and picked up her umbrella. Andrade could see that there was no chance of her changing her mind.
They drove through the town, which was unusually quiet. The few blacks in the streets were walking as closely as possible to the house walls. Soldiers from the town’s garrison were everywhere. Even the town’s firemen were carrying weapons, as were many civilians who had formed small groups to protect their neighbourhood if the riot were to spread. During the whole of the drive down to the fires and the centre of the revolt, Andrade talked about what he was going to do. Hanna was disgusted by the way in which he seemed to be looking forward to the opportunity to fire his gun at some of the black rioters.
But nothing turned out as Andrade had hoped. When they came down to the town and the chauffeur turned into a side street leading to the brothel, they found themselves in the midst of a violent confrontation between soldiers and a raging mass of black men. It was bayonets and rifles against cudgels and billhooks, fear versus limitless fury. The car was surrounded by furious Africans who started rocking it from side to side in an attempt to overturn it. There was a smell of burning paraffin everywhere. Hanna was horrified by the thought of being trapped inside a burning car. She tried in vain to force the passenger door open. The sound of rifle shots suddenly rang out. A black face that shortly before had been pressed up against the glass was suddenly transformed into a mess of blood and shattered splinters of bone. Hanna shouted to Andrade to use his revolver, but when she turned to look at him she saw that he was white with terror, and a pool of urine was expanding over his white linen trousers. The chauffeur managed to open the driver’s door, get out of the car, and was then immediately swallowed up by the crowd of people. Hanna was now so scared, she was afraid of losing consciousness. But the fear of being burnt to death was even stronger. She forced herself to clamber over into the front seat and get out of the car just as the chauffeur had done.
A Treacherous Paradise Page 18