Kennedy's Brain

by Henning Mankell

  'Henrik was never depressed.'

  'Perhaps he didn't show it when you were there? You said it yourself. You never see your own children clearly. Parents don't. When I met Henrik on that bus, he was laughing. But the Henrik I got to know was a very serious person. He was like me. He regarded the world as a mess that was only getting worse and heading for the ultimate catastrophe. He used to get animated when he talked about poverty. He tried to express his anger, but he always found it easier to express his sorrow. He was too softhearted, I think. Or it may be that I could never quite make him out. I regarded him as a failed idealist. But perhaps the truth was different. He was planning something, he wanted to resist. I remember once we were sitting at this very table, he was sitting where you are now, and he said that "every human being has to be his own resistance movement. We can never wait for others to act. This frightful world needs every single one of us to make an effort. When there's a fire, nobody asks where the water is going to come from. That fire simply has to be put out." I remember thinking that he could sometimes sound a bit high-flown. Like a priest. Perhaps all priests are romantics? I could get fed up of his seriousness. His anguish was like a barrier I kept thumping on. He was a social reformer, but he felt most sorry for himself. Nevertheless, there was a distinct seriousness under the surface that I could never ignore. A seriousness, a sorrow, a failed attempt to express anger. When he tried to be angry, he was more like a scared little boy. But everything had changed when he came back from that trip.'

  Nazrin dried up. Louise could see that she was trying hard to remember.

  'I noticed right away that something had happened. When he came from airside into the terminal he was walking slowly, almost as if he hesitated to go any further. He smiled when he saw me, but I remember thinking he looked as if he'd hoped nobody would be there to meet him. He was the same as usual, or at least he tried to be the same as usual. He was miles away mentally, even when we made love. I didn't know whether or not to be jealous. But he would have told me if he'd met another woman. I tried to find out where he'd been, but he just shook his head. When he unpacked his bags I noticed that there was red sand on the soles of one pair of shoes. I asked him about that, but he didn't answer, just seemed annoyed. Then all of a sudden, he changed completely again. His mind was no longer miles away, he became more cheerful, more at ease, as if he'd thrown off some invisible burden. I noticed that he was often tired when I came to visit him in the afternoons: he'd been up all night, but I could never get him to tell me what he'd been doing. He was writing something, I noticed more and more new files around the flat. All the time he used to talk about the anger that needed to be vented, about everything that was being hushed up, everything that ought to be exposed. It sometimes sounded as if he was quoting the Bible, as if he were turning into some kind of a prophet. I tried to make a joke about it once, but he was furious. It was the only time I've ever seen him really angry. I thought he was going to hit me. He raised his fist, tightly clenched – if I hadn't shouted he'd have punched me. I was scared. He apologised, but I didn't believe him.'

  Nazrin dried up again. Noises from the flat next door could be heard through the kitchen wall. Louise recognised the music, it was the theme tune of a film, but she couldn't remember its name.

  Nazrin buried her face in her hands. Louise sat motionless, waiting. What was she waiting for? She had no idea.

  Nazrin stood up.

  'I must go now. I haven't the strength to go on.'

  'Where can I get in touch with you?'

  Nazrin wrote her telephone number on one of the advertising leaflets. Then she picked up her coat, turned and left. Louise could hear the echo of her footsteps going down the stairs, then the sound of the front door closing.

  A few minutes later she left the flat herself. She walked towards Slussen, turning into side streets at random and keeping close to the walls of buildings, afraid of suddenly suffering a panic attack. When she came to Slussen she hailed a taxi and went to Djurgården. The wind had eased off, the air felt milder. She wandered through the trees dressed in their autumn colours, and thought back to what Nazrin had said.

  Sorrow that had suddenly disappeared, rather than unexpected happiness. A journey he did not want to talk about.

  An obsession? All those files? Louise was convinced the ones Nazrin had referred to were the ones she had read herself, about the assassinated president. Those were the ones Nazrin had seen. So Henrik's interest in the dead president's brain was not something long-term. It was something new.

  She strolled around the trees and meandered through the many thoughts running across her mind. Sometimes she was unsure if the autumn leaves were rustling in her head or under her feet.

  She suddenly remembered the letter from Aron she had found. She took it out of her pocket and opened it. It was brief.

  Still no icebergs. But I'm not giving up. Aron.

  What did it mean? Icebergs? Was it a code? A game? She put the letter back into her pocket and carried on walking.

  It was late afternoon when she returned to Henrik's flat. Somebody had left a message on the answering machine. Hi, it's Ivan. I'll try again later. Who was Ivan? Nazrin might know. She was about to call her, but changed her mind. She went into Henrik's bedroom and sat down on the mattress. She felt dizzy, but forced herself to remain seated.

  There was a photograph on a shelf of the two of them together.

  They had been to Madeira when Henrik was seventeen. They had spent a week on the island, and after visiting the Valley of the Nuns, they had decided to return in ten years' time. That was going to be the destination of their own very special pilgrimage. She suddenly felt very angry at the thought that somebody had robbed them of their journey. Death was so damnably long, she thought. So eternal. We shall never return to Correia des fuentes. Never.

  She looked around the room. Something had attracted her attention, but she was unsure what. She looked around again. A pair of bookshelves made her pause. At first she did not know why. Then she noticed that one of the books on the lower shelf was jutting out. She got up from the bed and ran her hand behind the books. She could feel two thin notebooks. She eased them out and took them to the kitchen. They were very simple notebooks, containing bits of handwriting in pencil, ink, Indian ink, and with lots of blots. The text was in English. On the cover of one it said: Memory Book for my mother Paula.

  Louise leafed through the thin book. It contained a few paragraphs, some dried flowers, the shrivelled skin of a little lizard, a few faded photographs, and a crayon drawing of a child's face. She read the text and gathered it was about a woman who would soon be dead, was suffering from Aids, and had written this little book for her children, something for them to remember her by when she was no longer with them. 'Don't cry too much, just cry enough to water the flowers you plant on my grave. Study and make use of your lives. Make use of your time.'

  Louise looked at the black woman's face that could just about be discerned in a faded photograph. She was smiling straight at the camera lens, straight at Louise's sorrow and feeling of hopelessness.

  She read the other book. Miriam's Memory Book for her daughter Ricki. There were no photographs here, the texts were short, the handwriting cramped. No dried flowers, a few empty pages. The book was not finished, it stopped in the middle of a sentence. 'There are so many things I would – '

  Louise tried to complete the sentence. In the same way that Miriam would have liked to say. Or do.

  There are so many things I would like to say to you, Henrik. Or do. But you have vanished, you have hidden yourself away from me. Above all you have left me with a terrible agony. I don't know why you vanished. I don't know what you were looking for and what drove you to what happened. You were alive, you didn't want to die. But now you are dead even so. I don't understand why.

  Louise looked at the notebooks lying on the kitchen table.

  I don't understand why you have these memory books about two women who died from Aids. Nor wh
y you had hidden them behind other books on your shelves.

  She slowly spread out the shards inside her head. She picked out the biggest fragments. She hoped they would act like magnets and attract other shards until it became possible to discern a whole.

  The red soil under his shoes. Where had he been to?

  She held her breath and tried to make out a pattern.

  I must have patience. In the same way that archaeology has taught me that you can only find your way through all the earth layers of history by using energy and gentleness. But never by hurrying.

  It was late when Louise left the flat that evening. She took a room in a different hotel. She phoned Artur and told him she would be back soon. Then she took out Göran Wrath's business card and rang him at home. He sounded half asleep when he answered. They agreed to meet in his office at nine o'clock the next morning.

  She emptied several of the little bottles of spirits in her minibar. Then she slept uneasily until about one in the morning.

  She lay awake for the rest of the night.

  The shards had still not spoken.

  CHAPTER 6

  Göran Wrath met her in the foyer of police headquarters. He smelled of tobacco, and on the way up to his office he told her that in his youth he had dreamed of searching for bones. She wasn't sure what he meant – it was only when they had sat down at his cluttered desk that she received an explanation. As a student he had been fascinated by the Leakey family who devoted their time to digging for human fossils, and if they sometimes failed to find humans, at least they discovered hominids in the deep canyons in East Africa known as the Rift Valley.

  Wrath removed a mountain of documents from his desk and keyed a number into his telephone that would block incoming calls.

  'I used to dream about it. Deep down I knew I would become a police officer. But, nevertheless, I used to dream about finding what was then called "the missing link". When did apes become humans? Or perhaps one ought to rephrase that and ask: when did humans stop being apes? Now and then when I get time, I try to read up on all the latest discoveries that have been made in recent years. But it becomes increasingly obvious to me that the only missing links I'm going to find are to do with my police work.'

  He stopped abruptly, as if he had let slip a secret by mistake. Louise observed him with a vague feeling of sadness. She was sitting opposite a man with an unfulfilled dream. The world was full of middle-aged men like Göran Wrath. In the end, the dream became no more than a pale reflection of what had once been a burning passion.

  What had her dream been? Nothing at all, really. Archaeology had been her first passion after the giantlike Emil had let her go and she had travelled a couple of hundred miles north in order to shake him off and become a normal person again. It often seemed to her that her life had taken shape when the little train stopped at Rätansbyn, halfway between Östersund and Sveg, where they were due to meet their southbound counterpart. There was a hot-dog stall at the side of the station building. Everybody seemed to be overcome by extreme pangs of hunger when the train came to a halt. Whoever was last in the queue might have to go hungry – either because the stall had run out of sausages, or because the train was about to leave.

  She had not joined in the mad rush for the hot-dog stall. She had remained in her seat, and it was then she had resolved to become an archaeologist. She had considered taking the long course to become a doctor: specialising in children's illnesses was also a tempting possibility. But as darkness fell, she had made up her mind that night at Rätansbyn. It seemed an obvious choice to make, there was no longer any doubt about it. She would devote her life to hunting down the past. She pictured herself working on the front line, doing the actual digging; but she also had a vague idea that her future might just as well lie in searching for secrets in old manuscripts, reinterpreting the facts that had been established by previous generations of archaeologists.

  On all sides she was surrounded by people chewing away at sausages with mustard and ketchup, and a strange feeling of peace enveloped her. She knew.

  Göran Wrath had left the room and returned with a cup of coffee. She had declined his offer to bring one for her. She settled down on her chair with the feeling that she would need to put up a fight.

  He spoke to her in a friendly tone of voice, as if she were a close friend of his.

  'There is nothing to suggest that your son was murdered.'

  'I want to know every detail.'

  'We don't know every detail yet. It takes time to root out everything that has occurred when a person dies unexpectedly. Death is a complicated business. Probably the most complicated and hard to grasp process that life has to offer. We know a lot more about how a human being is created than we know about how life comes to an end.'

  'I'm talking about my son! Not some foetus or other, or an old man in a care home!'

  Afterwards, she wondered if Göran Wrath had expected her outburst. He must have been in this position many times before – faced with desperate parents who could not have their child back but nevertheless wanted some form of redress, no matter how pointless it might seem. Not wanting to be classified as a bad parent, not wanting to be accused of being remiss.

  Wrath opened a plastic folder on the desk in front of him.

  'There is no answer,' he said. 'There ought to have been. I can only apologise. Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, the test results have been destroyed and have to be done again. Doctors and lab technicians are hard at work. They are meticulous, they need time. But the first thing we need to do, of course, is to establish that no outside party was involved. And there wasn't.'

  'Henrik was not the suicidal type.'

  Wrath looked at her hard and long before answering.

  'My father was called Hugo Wrath. Everybody considered him to be the most cheerful person in the world. He was always laughing, he loved his family. Every morning he would set off for his job as a typographer for Dagens Nyheter in a cheerful mood. Nevertheless he unexpectedly committed suicide at the age of forty-nine. He had seen the birth of his first grandchild, and he had received a pay rise. He had just concluded a long-running dispute with his sisters and hence was the sole owner of a holiday home on Utö. I was eleven at the time, still a little boy. He always used to come in and give me a hug before I fell asleep. One Tuesday morning he got up as usual, had breakfast, read the morning paper, was in a good mood as usual, hummed a tune as he fastened his shoes, and gave my mum a kiss before leaving. Then he set off on his bike. The same route as usual. But just before he came to Torsgatan, he turned off. He didn't go to work at all. He left town altogether. Somewhere in Sollentuna he branched off into country lanes that led into the forest. There's a scrapyard there that you can see clearly as you approach Arlanda airport. He parked his bicycle and disappeared into the scrap metal. They eventually found him on the back seat of an old Dodge. He had lain down there, taken a huge overdose of sleeping tablets, and died. I can remember the funeral. Obviously, the shock over his death was immense. But the most painful aspect nevertheless was not knowing why. The whole funeral was dominated by that mysterious, painful 'why'. Nobody said a word at the gathering for coffee afterwards.'

  Louise felt provoked. Her son had nothing to do with Göran Wrath's father.

  Wrath understood her reaction. He leafed through the file on the desk in front of him, although he already knew what was in it.

  'There is no explanation for why Henrik died. The only thing we are certain of is that there was no obvious physical violence.'

  'I could see that myself.'

  'There's nothing to suggest that another person caused his death.'

  'What do the doctors have to say?'

  'That there is no simple explanation. Which shouldn't surprise anybody. When a young, healthy person dies suddenly, there has to be something unexpected behind what happened. We'll find out eventually.'

  'What?'

  Wrath shook his head.

  'Some little part stop
s working. When some minor connection or other is broken it can cause just as much damage as when a dam wall collapses or when a volcano erupts without warning. The medics are looking for clues.'