After the Fire

by Henning Mankell

  The quarrel ended just as suddenly as it had flared up. They both sat down in sullen silence, but they were watching one another and might easily launch a fresh attack.

  Wiman used the lull in hostilities to return to how important it was for those of us living out on the islands to look out for strangers who appeared in the harbour or on boats around the archipelago. At that point his audience seemed to come to life. Many people wanted to speak or at least waved their hands to show that they were engaged in the debate. A young fisherman from the southern part of the archipelago stood up and said in a trembling voice (I’m not sure if he was nervous about addressing the gathering or flustered because of what he was going to say) that it was these strangers – foreigners, in fact – who were responsible for dragging Sweden further and further down. Perhaps one couldn’t blame these mysterious foreigners for eradicating the fish in the waters of the archipelago; that was down to ‘the bloody Polacks’ as he insisted more than once. Not people from the Baltic countries or Russia. No, the lack of perch these days was definitely down to the bloody Polacks. But the foreigners were clearly responsible for everything else: any form of crime, particularly the theft of outboard motors, break-ins and these arson attacks. Sweden had abandoned its borders. The Sweden that had once been ours had been handed over to the hordes who were now allowed to pour across its borders and help themselves.

  I sat in my corner listening to this agitated young man, his freckled face glowing in the heat. He was obviously convinced that he was speaking the truth. At that moment his faith was greater than Wiman’s had ever been. He carried on ranting about foreigners and the politicians who allowed them to ravage our country. He cursed uncontrolled immigration; he applied his verbal branding iron to the forehead of everyone with evil intentions, be they beggars or pickpockets, who were running amok mainly in our cities, but whose presence was increasingly being felt in rural areas and now around our islands.

  Then he burst into tears. It was such a shock that the whole room stopped breathing. He covered his face with his hands, his whole body shaking as he slumped back down on his chair. He had come alone; there was no wife or relative to comfort him.

  I realised later that his tears were a call to arms. Islander after islander stood up in support of the young man, saying how right he was. Xenophobia, based on nothing more than myths, hearsay and what a friend of a friend had allegedly experienced, settled over the room like a fetid cloud. Few people took a different view. Wiman did his best, but he lacked the strength – and perhaps the conviction. The only one who really protested against the tone was Annika Wallmark, who had a small ceramics workshop just outside the town, but as she was a well-known radical, no one took any notice of her. Murmurs broke out as soon as she opened her mouth.

  Veronika had sprained her foot falling off her horse during a trek in Iceland, and had come back limping. She said what we all knew: that we could only guess at the identity of the perpetrator. There was a significant risk that we would start looking for a scapegoat and spreading even more toxic rumours.

  What did I say – the doctor with a daughter who was a pickpocket in Paris? I didn’t agree with the young fisherman, nor did my views match those of Annika Wallmark.

  I said nothing. The meeting and all those voices turned into a labyrinth, simultaneously threatening and reassuring. We would keep an eye on each other’s houses, we would watch any unfamiliar vessels with eyes more used to looking out for seabirds during the hunting season. We had shifted every last scrap of suspicion from ourselves to those nameless individuals who had invaded our country.

  I said nothing, but as Wiman began to draw the meeting to a close I experienced an unfamiliar, nasty taste in my mouth. I thought about Louise and her Ahmed; if he had turned up here and heard how he was regarded, as a representative of all those foreigners, I’m sure he would have fled. Would I have been able to defend him?

  Something unfamiliar was hiding beneath the surface I knew so well, and it frightened me.

  I walked back to the boat with Jansson. It was dark by now. We could hear muttered conversations here and there between those who had been at the meeting; the breath coming out of their mouths was like a series of smoke signals.

  Down on the jetty there was a little shed where the association stored its flags and flagpoles. I stood in the doorway as Jansson changed out of his suit and into warm maritime clothing. A bell rang in my head as I watched him, but I couldn’t understand why.

  Jansson carefully folded up his suit and put it in a plastic bag. I still couldn’t work out what the situation reminded me of.

  Something was bothering me, but what?

  We went out onto the jetty; some of the boats were already on their way, their navigation lights showing. Someone was locking the doors up at the centre. Jansson and I nodded to one another, and he disappeared down the hatch to fire up his engine. I switched on my torch, pulled the cord to start my engine and set off for home.

  The late afternoon was very cold. The ice had started to form in the inlets and along the coast. If the temperature continued to fall, most of the archipelago would soon be surrounded by ice.

  Back in the warmth of the caravan, I was finally able to shake off the unpleasant feeling from the meeting. I had seen and heard people I thought I knew, but who had turned out to hold opinions I would never have expected.

  What had I expected? What had I thought about these people’s view of the world beyond the islands?

  I was sitting there with a cup of coffee, still unable to answer my questions, when Lisa Modin called. We had spoken a few times since the morning of New Year’s Day, but when I had wanted to go and see her or suggested that she should come to me, she had said no. I had been careful not to try and persuade her; I was afraid she might withdraw completely.

  ‘How was the meeting?’ she asked.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Lisa Modin or the journalist?’

  ‘We’re the same person.’

  I had told her I was going to the meeting; after all, Kolbjörn Eriksson had called me when I was lying on her bed. But how could she know it was over and that I’d got home just a little while ago?

  ‘Who’ve you been talking to?’

  ‘I’m talking to you.’

  ‘How do you know the meeting is over?’

  ‘I guessed.’

  I didn’t believe her. She must have spoken to someone; the only person I could think of was the woman no one listened to.

  ‘You’ve been talking to someone, and I know who it is. Annika Wallmark.’

  ‘I never reveal my sources.’

  ‘She pops up from behind her potter’s wheel, gossiping and talking about all kinds of stuff, and no one gives a damn.’

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me how the meeting went, instead of trying to get answers to impossible questions?’

  ‘It was well attended and we were all in agreement. We’re going to keep an eye on what’s happening to our neighbours’ houses. We islanders have added an eleventh commandment. We’re going to transform ourselves into vigilantes, so to speak. It sounds pathetic and it is pathetic, but it’s also true. It was Wiman, the priest, who said those words.’

  ‘Can you tell me any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What was the atmosphere like?’

  I had the feeling that she knew considerably more than she was letting on. Did she have other contacts? Jansson? Hardly. Nor the young fisherman who had started crying. Wiman, perhaps?

  I realised I didn’t trust anyone who had been at the meeting. I tried to change the subject: when would she like to come and visit my caravan again?

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Maybe I’m too old and boring. It would be better if you just came straight out with it. Old doctors can usually cope with the truth.’

  That was a lie. If anything distinguished us from other people, it was probably the fact that we were less well equipped to deal
with the truth.

  ‘No,’ Lisa said. ‘You’re not too old. But both of us are solitary by nature.’

  When the conversation was over, I went back to my cup of coffee. I still thought there was a chance that I might manage to break out of my loneliness through meeting Lisa Modin, in spite of everything.

  I was aware of a growing sense of happiness. There was Lisa, there was Louise and there was the baby. I felt nothing yet for Ahmed and Muhammed, but perhaps it would come one day.

  I lay down on the bed, with the radio quietly playing music that was supposed to be calming.

  I had just dozed off when I woke with a start. At first I didn’t know why, but then I realised.

  When Jansson called me after the New Year’s Eve party to tell me that the Valfridssons’ house was burning, he had said that he had been at home and had been woken up. And yet he had been wearing at least some of the same clothes from the party when I met him later, at the fire. I had reacted, but without giving the matter any further thought.

  I lay in bed with the radio still playing. I recognised an old song: ‘Sail Along Silvery Moon’.

  Thinking about Jansson’s clothes made me anxious, but I still didn’t know what it was that I had discovered.

  It was like an unexpected reef in what I thought was a well-charted shipping lane.

  CHAPTER 24

  The cold never loosened its grip during the week following Twelfth Night. Ice began to form in the bays and inlets. I still didn’t need an axe to cut a hole when I went down for my morning dip, but a thick mist lay just above the surface of the water, which was growing blacker by the day. Soon the ripples would turn to ice.

  Two days after the archipelago meeting I was sitting in the caravan playing patience when I felt unwell. It was like a nausea in my head rather than my stomach. I left the cards, put on my jacket and went outside. I didn’t know what was wrong. I had spoken to Louise the previous evening, and everything was fine. She promised to send me some new pictures of Agnes. When I asked if she and Ahmed needed any financial assistance, she just laughed and said she would let me know when poverty really moved into their apartment.

  I had also spoken to Lisa Modin; she was in her car on the way to Stockholm, so it had been a short conversation. She was going to a school reunion, having accepted the invitation after much hesitation. She promised to call me when she got back.

  I walked around the island. The frost sparkled like glass on the site of the fire and the blackened remains of my house. I went up to my grandfather’s bench, pulling on the gloves that were in my pocket.

  We were approaching the depths of winter. Almost every year there is a point when the islands and bays close their doors. No one is allowed in or out. The shops are shut, the curtains drawn. Sometimes it happened as early as the end of November or the beginning of December, sometimes not until February.

  In some years the archipelago didn’t close down at all. My grandfather used to say that if the sea didn’t ice over and the snow didn’t cover the skerries, then come summer the fishing would be poor. I had once asked Jansson if that was true, and he had firmly answered no. However, when I told him that was what my grandfather had said, he immediately changed his mind.

  The nauseous feeling in my head had now turned into a vague, nagging pain. I decided to row across to my tent. Perhaps I had spent too long sitting at the table in the caravan and needed some exercise. I went down to the boathouse and pushed out the skiff. There wasn’t a breath of wind. I rowed with powerful strokes and immediately started sweating. After every fifteenth stroke I rested on the oars for a moment before carrying on.

  When I was five years old, my grandfather built a little boat for me to play with. He used Masonite board, with a prow and stern made of pine and oars of alder. That boat had been my most cherished possession throughout my childhood.

  Could I make something similar for Agnes? Probably not; it was far too big a job for an inexperienced carpenter. However, perhaps I could ask Kolbjörn Eriksson? I had heard that he was exceptionally talented in the skilled art of boatbuilding.

  I reached the skerry and pulled the skiff ashore. The tent was securely anchored in the little hollow; I had come over to check on it every time we had had high winds, but it had stood firm.

  I immediately saw that I had had visitors. The bank of stones forming a wall around the cooking area had grown, and someone had made a hook on which to hang a pot to boil water. I opened the tent flap and was struck by a smell I recognised: acetone. Could my mysterious visitor be a woman? Acetone made me think of nail polish, which Harriet had used. And hadn’t Louise been wearing nail polish when I saw her in Paris?

  Of course I also realised that there was a more disturbing possibility: acetone is an important ingredient in the production of synthetic drugs, above all the narcotic known as Spice. Was a junkie seeking refuge in my tent from time to time?

  I found this idea upsetting. All my life I have felt antipathy towards those who sully their lives with drugs. As a surgeon I often had to operate on someone who had taken something and been involved in an accident, or been stabbed in a dispute over those expensive commodities. As they lay there on the table, helpless under the knife, I frequently thought that I was doing what I was supposed to do, but that I really didn’t care what happened to them afterwards.

  When I attempted to discuss this with my colleagues, none of them seemed to agree with me. I soon gave up, deciding that I was probably ill-suited to my profession when it came to my views on the value of certain individuals.

  No doubt that was partly why the smell in the tent bothered me so much. I crawled outside, closed the flap, wondered whether I ought to take down the tent, then went on a tour of inspection around the skerry. In a crevice, neatly covered by torn-up moss, I found a small rubbish heap. I rooted through the empty milk cartons and bread wrappings and came across a scrap of black rubber. At first I thought it was a piece of a tyre from a bicycle, then I realised it was actually neoprene and therefore more likely to have come from a diving suit. However, this was an unsatisfactory conclusion; no one dived in the waters off these islands in the winter. Nor could it have drifted ashore on the southern side of the skerry where I found it; the wind out here is almost always offshore.

  So it couldn’t be part of a diving suit. All of a sudden I knew: it came from a wetsuit worn by surfers to keep out the chill from the wind and water. My visitor was the black-clad windsurfer who had turned up in the autumn and on several occasions had headed out towards the open sea with his board and his sail.

  I stood scanning the horizon, but there was nothing to see except the banks of cloud slowly drifting in from the Gulf of Finland.

  I walked around the skerry again, but I couldn’t find any more clues.

  I didn’t have time to worry about the identity of my visitor. As I set off for home I decided it was the moment to tackle the insurance company so that the construction of the new house could get under way. I didn’t have time to wait, either for my own sake or for the sake of my daughter and granddaughter.

  From time to time I rested on the oars and gazed down into the dark water, hoping to spot another drift net floating silently along in the depths like a predator seeking its prey. But the sea was empty and black, with no hint of light.

  Back on the island I pictured the new house slowly rising from the ruins. Even though all my photographs had been destroyed in the fire, I knew that the local history association had commissioned a photographer to document all the houses and boathouses in the archipelago during my grandparents’ day. The pictures were kept in the association’s archive collection. I should have thought of that when I was at the meeting; Wiman was the archivist and would have been able to help me.

  I had been asked to join the association’s board more than once, but I had always refused, feeling slightly more guilty each time. Jansson, who had served on the board several times, had told me there were no more than four meetings a year; the work was not arduous.
It was an important organisation that did a great deal to fight for those who lived in the archipelago.

  However, I knew that Jansson wasn’t telling the whole truth. I had heard rumours, even without Jansson’s assistance; there were deep divisions between various members and groups. At times it seemed as if open warfare raged between different factions. I had never really understood the reasons behind this seething tension, but something told me it was essentially down to the fact that there was only one dung heap and far too many aspiring cockerels.

  I called Wiman; I began by saying how well I thought he had handled the meeting, then I asked about photographs of my house. He promised to look through the archive to see what he could find.

  ‘Things weren’t kept in particularly good order in the past,’ he said. ‘The archive is in a state somewhere between chaos and a complete mess, created by the archivists with the apparent aim of making it impossible to find what you’re looking for.’

  He was in danger of tipping over into his preacher’s voice, so I quickly ended the call.

  I spent the next few hours playing poker with myself. It’s the saddest expression of loneliness I know. I never feel more overwhelmed by weariness and unhappiness than when I’m trying to win money off myself. There is no deeper form of isolation.

  I sat there for a long time that evening making notes about the new house; I hoped to start building in the early spring. There was no need to lay new foundations, so it was just a matter of removing the burned-out ruins. I intended to ask both Jansson and Kolbjörn Eriksson for advice; I would ignore whatever Jansson said, but I didn’t want to incur the sullenness and ill will that would follow if I didn’t consult him. Kolbjörn was the one I trusted.