Kennedy's Brain

by Henning Mankell

  He wanted her to send him a lithograph of a hawk pouncing on a dove, a picture they had bought shortly after they were married, when they happened to visit an art gallery. A week or so later, she sent him the picture. It was about then she realised that he had started to contact his son again, albeit secretly.

  Aron continued to appear on the horizon. She sometimes wondered if she would ever be able to erase his features and discard the assessment table she used to measure other men with – and which sooner or later led to their being condemned, rejected.

  She phoned Henrik again. Every time the old wounds from her relationship with Aron were opened up, she needed to hear Henrik's voice in order to avoid being overwhelmed by bitterness. But once again her only response was the answering machine, and she left a message to the effect that she wouldn't phone again until she arrived in Visby.

  Every time he failed to answer, she felt a twinge of childish unrest. For a second or two she imagined accidents, fires, illnesses. Then she calmed down again. Henrik was very careful, never took unnecessary risks, even if he did a lot of travelling and liked to probe the unknown.

  She went outside the back door to smoke a cigarette. She could hear the sound of laughter from Mitsos's house. The man laughing was Panayiotis, Mitsos's elder brother. To the mortification of his family Panayiotis had won a fortune on the lottery and hence created the financial foundation for a life of idleness. Louise smiled at the thought, inhaled deeply and made a mental note that she would give up smoking on her sixtieth birthday.

  She was alone in the darkness. The sky was full of stars, the evening warm, and there were no chilly breezes. So this is where I've ended up, she thought. From the melancholy northern wastelands of Sveg and Härjedalen to Greece and Bronze Age graves. From snow and ice to the warm, dry olive groves.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and went back indoors. Her foot was hurting. She paused, uncertain of what to do next. Then she phoned Vassilis's number again. It was no longer engaged, but nobody answered.

  At that moment Vassilis's face merged in her mind with that of Aron.

  Vassilis was cheating her, he was treating her as a part of his life he could do without.

  Feeling jealous, she phoned his mobile. No reply. A Greek female voice asked her to leave a message. She gritted her teeth and said nothing.

  Then she closed her suitcase and made up her mind at the same moment to put an end to her relationship with Vassilis. She would wind up the cash book, close it down, just as she had closed her suitcase.

  She lay down on her bed and stared up at the stationary ceiling fan. How on earth could she have entered into a relationship with Vassilis? It suddenly seemed incomprehensible, she felt that the whole business was distasteful. Not so much from his point of view, but from hers.

  The fan was motionless, her jealousy had faded away, and the dogs out there in the darkness were no longer barking. As usual when faced with an important decision, she addressed herself in the third person.

  Louise Cantor here, autumn 2004. This is where she leads her life, black on white – or rather, red on black, which is the usual colour combination on the fragments of urns we dig up from the Greek earth. Louise Cantor is fifty-four years old, she is not scared when she looks at her face or her body in a mirror. She is still attractive, not yet old; men notice her even if they don't turn round to look at her. What about her? Who does she turn round to look at? Or does she only look back in time to see the faces and traces of the past? Louise Cantor has just closed a book entitled Vassilis. She will never open it again. He will not even be allowed to drive Louise Cantor to the airport in Athens tomorrow morning.

  She got up from the bed and looked up the number of a local taxi firm. The woman she spoke to was hard of hearing, but she managed to shout loud enough to make herself understood. She could only hope that the taxi she had ordered really would turn up on time. As Vassilis had arranged to pick her up at five, she ordered a taxi for half past four.

  She sat down at her desk and wrote a letter to Vassilis. This is it, it's all over. All good things come to an end. I can feel that I'm on my way to somewhere else. I'm sorry that you came to pick me up in vain. I did try to ring you. Louise.

  She read through the letter. Did she have second thoughts? She often did – she had written so many farewell letters in her life that had never been sent. But not this one. She put the letter into an envelope, sealed it, and braved the darkness to fasten it to the letter box by her gate with a clothes peg.

  She dozed for a few hours on top of her bed, drank a glass of wine and stared at a pack of sleeping pills without being able to make up her mind.

  The taxi turned up a few minutes early, and it was pitch black. She was waiting for it, by the gate. Mitsos's dogs were barking. She slumped down into the back seat and closed her eyes. She couldn't sleep until her journey had started.

  It was dawn when she arrived at the airport.

  CHAPTER 2

  When she had checked in her suitcase with one of Lufthansa's half-asleep staff and was on her way to the security barrier, something happened that made a very deep impression on her.

  Looking back, she would think that she ought to have taken it as an omen, a warning. But she didn't. All she saw was a solitary woman sitting on the stone floor with her bundles and ancient suitcases held together by the string tied round them. The woman was crying. She was totally immobile, completely self-absorbed. She was old, her sunken cheeks indicating that many teeth were missing. Louise thought she might well be from Albania. There were a lot of Albanian women looking for work in Greece, they are prepared to do anything at all since a little is better than nothing, and Albania is a desperately poor country. She had a scarf round her head, the scarf of a decent elderly lady, she was not a Muslim; but she was sitting on the floor, crying. The woman was on her own, it looked as if she had been washed ashore in this airport, surrounded by her bundles, her life in tatters, and all she had left was this heap of worthless flotsam.

  Louise paused, people in a hurry barged into her, but she stood firm as if bracing herself against a strong wind. The woman on the floor surrounded by the bundles had a brown, furrowed face, her skin was like a petrified lava landscape. There is a special sort of beauty in the faces of old women, where everything has been reduced to a thin film stretched over bare bones, where all the events of her life are registered. Two parched furrows had been excavated from her eyes down towards her cheeks, and they were now filled with the woman's tears.

  She is watering a pain I know nothing about, Louise thought. But something inside her is also inside me.

  The woman suddenly raised her head, her eyes met Louise's briefly, and she slowly shook her head. Louise took it as an indication that her assistance, whatever that might have involved, was not needed. She hurried on towards the security check, elbowing her way through the teeming crowd, through a haze smelling of garlic and olives. When she turned round to look, it was as if a human curtain had closed and the woman was no longer visible.

  Louise had kept a diary since she was very young in which she used to record incidents that she thought she would never forget. This was one of them. She thought about what she would write as she placed her handbag on the moving belt, her mobile phone in a small blue plastic box, and passed through the magic barrier that separated bad from good.

  She bought a bottle of Tullamore Dew for herself and two bottles of retsina for Henrik. Then she sat down outside the exit and found to her annoyance that she had left her diary behind in Argolis. She could see it in her mind's eye, on the table next to the green lamp. She took the conference programme from her bag and wrote down on the back of it: 'Old woman weeping at Athens airport. A face of human ruin, dug up after thousands of years by a curious and intrusive archaeologist. Why was she crying? That universal question. Why does a person cry?'

  She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what must have been inside those bundles and the battered suitcases.

  Emptiness, she
decided. Empty suitcases, or perhaps filled with ash from fires long since extinguished.

  When it was announced that her flight was boarding, she woke up with a start. She went to her aisle seat and sat down next to a man who gave the impression of being terrified of flying. She decided to sleep as far as Frankfurt, and to delay breakfast until the flight from Frankfurt to Stockholm.

  When she got to Arlanda and had retrieved her suitcase, she still felt tired. She always looked forward to a trip, but not the journey itself. She suspected that one of these days she would suffer a panic attack in mid-flight. So for many years now, she had always taken with her a pack of tranquillisers, in readiness for when the attack took place.

  Louice made her way to the domestic terminal, handed over her suitcase to a woman who was rather more awake than the one in Athens, and sat down to wait. A door opened and she was hit by a blast of Swedish autumn wind. She shuddered, and made a mental note to buy a jumper knitted from the local Gotland wool while she was in Visby. Gotland and Greece have sheep in common, she thought. If Gotland had olive groves, there would not be much difference between the places.

  She wondered if she ought to ring Henrik. But he might be asleep: his day was often the night, and he preferred to work by starlight rather than sunshine. Instead she dialled the number of her father up in Ulvkälla, just outside Sveg, on the southern side of the River Ljusnan. He never slept, she could phone him at any time of day or night. She had never managed to catch him asleep, no matter when she rang. That's how she remembered him from her childhood as well. She had a father who had banished the Sandman, a giant of a man whose eyes were always open, who was always alert, always ready to protect his daughter.

  She dialled the number, but hung up the moment she heard it ringing. She had nothing to say to him just now. She put the phone into her suitcase and thought of Vassilis. He had not left a message on her mobile. But why should he? She felt a pang of disappointment. She suppressed it immediately, regret was not on the agenda. Louise Cantor came from a family that did not reflect on a decision once it had been made, even if it had been totally wrong. The rule was to grin and bear it, no matter what.

  A cold wind was blowing in from the sea as the aeroplane thudded down onto the runway at Visby. The wind played havoc with her overcoat as she crouched down and hurried into the terminal. A man was holding up a card with her name on it. As they drove to the town centre, she watched the trees; the wind was so strong, they would lose most of their leaves. There's a battle going on between the seasons, she thought. A battle whose outcome is a foregone conclusion, from the very start.

  She was staying at the Strand hotel, which was on the hill running down to the harbour. Her room did not have a view of the square, and she begged the receptionist to give her one that did. She was in luck. The new room was smaller, but it faced in the right direction and the first thing she did when she entered her room was to look out of the window. What can I see? she thought. What am I hoping is going to happen out there?

  She had an incantation that kept running through her mind. I'm fifty-four years old. I'm here now, where am I heading for, when will I get there?

  She watched an old lady struggling with her dog on the windswept hill. She felt more in sympathy with the dog than with the lady in the lurid red coat.

  Shortly before four that afternoon she went to the college, which was situated on the water's edge. It was not far, and she had time to stroll round the deserted harbour. Water was being hurled at the stone quays. The colour was different from the Aegean surrounding the Greek mainland and islands. It's wilder here, she thought. More primitive, a young tearaway sea that launches an attack on the first vessel or quay that it comes across.

  The wind was still strong, but perhaps more squally now. A ferry was on its way out from the harbour to the open sea. Louise was a punctual person. As far as she was concerned it was just as important not to arrive too early as it was not to arrive late. A friendly man with a scar where his hare lip had been operated on welcomed her at the entrance. He was one of the organisers, introduced himself, and said that they had met once before, many years ago; but she could not remember him. Recalling other people is one of the most difficult of social skills, she knew that. Faces change, and often become unrecognisable. But she smiled at him and said she remembered him, remembered him very well.

  All twenty-two of them assembled in an impersonal conference room. They pinned on their name tags, drank coffee and tea, then listened to a Dr Stefanis from Latvia who started proceedings in faltering English with a paper on recent discoveries of Minoan ceramics that presented classification difficulties. She could not understand what was so difficult to classify: Minoan ceramics were Minoan ceramics, full stop.

  She soon realised that she was not listening. In spirit she was still in Argolis, breathing in the smell of thyme and rosemary. She studied the other people sitting round the oval-shaped table. Which of them were listening, which of them were like her, transported of their own volition into another reality? She knew none of the others round the table, apart from the man who claimed he had met her on some occasion in the past. They were all from the Nordic and Baltic countries, some of them field archaeologists like herself.

  Dr Stefanis stopped abruptly, as if he could no longer cope with his bad English. After the polite applause came a brief and decidedly subdued discussion. Some announcements regarding practical arrangements for the next day were made, and the opening session of the conference came to an end. On her way out of the building she was asked to wait behind for a moment, because a photographer from a local newspaper wanted to take a picture of as many of the archaeologists attending the conference as he could fit in. He noted her name, and afterwards she surrendered herself to the tender mercies of the stormy wind.

  Louise fell asleep on her bed, and when she woke up was not at all sure where she was. Her mobile was on the table. She ought to phone Henrik, but decided to wait until she'd eaten. She went to the square, took pot luck and ended up in a basement restaurant that had few diners but served good food. She drank several glasses of wine, again regretted that she had broken off her relationship with Vassilis, but tried to concentrate on the lecture she would deliver the following day. She drank another glass of wine and ran through in her mind what she was going to say. She had it written down, but as she had given it before, she could almost remember it off by heart.

  I shall talk about the colours red and black in the clay. The reddish colour of the clay is caused by ferric oxide: during the firing process, the iron in the ferric oxide is separated from the oxygen and the clay turns black. As the pottery cools, the iron and the oxygen bond again if oxygen is present in the kiln, and the clay regains its red hues. If no oxygen is present, the clay remains black. So although the finished pot might be either red or black, the colours originate from the same raw material.

  The wine was taking effect, her body felt warm, her head was filled with waves flowing back and forth. She paid her bill, emerged into the gusting wind and told herself that she was already longing for tomorrow to come.

  She phoned the flat in Stockholm. Still the answering machine. Sometimes Henrik would make a special recording just for her if something important had happened, a private message she shared with the whole world. She said that she was in Visby, that she was on her way. Then she rang his mobile. No answer.

  She felt uneasy, a feeling so slight that she was barely aware of it.

  She slept that night with the window open. She woke up once, around midnight. Some young drunks were shouting about a girl who was an easy lay, but evidently she wouldn't have them.

  At ten o'clock the next morning she delivered her paper on Attic clay and its consistency. She talked about the high iron content and contrasted the red colour of the ferric oxide with the lime-rich clay from Corinth that produced white or even green ceramics. After a hesitant start – several of her audience had evidently had a long and late dinner the previous evening, washed down with
copious amounts of wine – she managed to capture their interest. She spoke for exactly forty-five minutes, and received an enthusiastic round of applause when she finished. During the subsequent discussion she did not have to field any awkward questions, and when they broke up for coffee, she felt she had justified her coming here.