Kennedy's Brain

by Henning Mankell

  They parked the car on a gravelled plot at the edge of the forest. The tall eucalyptus trees formed a wall in front of them. A path meandered down a slope before disappearing from view.

  They started walking, him first.

  'I take care of the forest, make sure there are no fires, and prevent the visitors from leaving a mess. It takes half an hour to walk through the forest and back to the starting point. I like to watch the people who undertake that walk. Many of them look exactly the same when they get back, but others have changed. There is a large part of our soul in a rainforest.'

  The path sloped steeply down. Aron stopped occasionally to point something out. The trees, their names, their ages, the narrow streams deep down under their feet bubbling with the same water as had flowed there millions of years ago. Louise had the impression that what he was really showing her was his own life, how he had changed.

  At the very bottom of the valley, in the depths of the rainforest, there was a bench. Aron wiped it with the sleeve of his jacket. Water was dripping down everywhere. They sat down. The forest was silent, damp, cold. Louise had fallen in love with it, just as she was in love with the endless forests back home in Härjedalen.

  'I came here to get away from it all,' said Aron.

  'You never used to be able to function unless you were surrounded by people. Surely you couldn't become a recluse, just like that?'

  'Something happened.'

  'What?'

  'You're not going to believe this.'

  There was a fluttering noise among the trees and lianas. She glimpsed a bird flying upwards, towards the distant sunlight.

  'I lost something when I realised that I could no longer live with you. I let you and Henrik down, but I let myself down just as much.'

  'That doesn't explain anything.'

  'There's nothing to explain. I don't understand myself. That's the absolute truth.'

  'I think that's an excuse. Why can't you be honest with me?'

  'I can't explain it. Something broke. I had to get away. I spent a year drinking heavily, wandering around, burning bridges, using up money. Then I landed up with that bunch of loonies who had made up their minds to save the memory of the world. That's what we called ourselves: 'Protectors of the Memory'. I've tried to drink myself to death, work myself to death, laze myself to death, fish myself to death, feed red parrots until I eventually drop dead. But I've survived.'

  'I need your help to find out what really happened. Henrik's death is my death as well. I can't bring myself back to life until I understand why he died. What was he doing shortly before he died? Where did he travel to? What people did he meet? What happened? Did he speak to you?'

  'He suddenly stopped writing three months ago. Before that I often received a letter a week.'

  'Do you still have the letters?'

  'I saved all his letters.'

  Louise stood up.

  'I need your help. I want you to go through several disks I have with me. They are copies of the data inside his computer that I haven't managed to access. I want you to do everything you can, to dig down into "the ones and zeros" and reveal what's hidden there.'

  They continued along the path that now sloped upwards until they came back to their starting point. A bus full of schoolchildren had just arrived, the kids came swarming out in their brightly coloured anoraks.

  'Children cheer me up,' said Aron. 'Children love tall trees, mysterious ravines, streams you can hear but can't see.'

  They got into the car. Aron's hand was on the ignition key.

  'What I said about the children applies to grown men as well. I can also love a stream you can only hear but can't see.'

  On the way back to the house with the parrots Aron stopped at a shop to buy food. Louise went in with him. He seemed to know everybody, something that surprised her. How did that fit in with his desire to be invisible, unknown? As they drove up the steep mountain road, she put the question to him.

  'They don't know what my name is, or where I live. There's a difference between knowing somebody, and recognising somebody. They're at ease because my face isn't that of a stranger. I belong here. They don't want to know any more than that, really. It's enough for me to be somebody who keeps calling in at the shop, doesn't cause trouble and pays his bills.'

  That day Aron cooked lunch. Fish again. He seemed to be more approachable when they were eating, Louise thought. As if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders – not his sorrow over Henrik's death, but something to do with her.

  When they had finished, he asked her to tell him again about the funeral, and about the girl Nazrin.

  'Did he never mention her in his letters?'

  'Never. If he referred to girls, they were always nameless. He could give them faces and bodies, but not names. He was remarkable in many ways.'

  'He was like you. When he was little and in his teens, I always used to think he was like me. But now I know he took after you. I thought that if he lived long enough he would have completed the circle and come back to me.'

  She burst into tears. He went out to scatter birdseed over the table.

  Later that afternoon he put two bundles of letters on the table in front of her.

  'I'll be away for a few hours,' he said. 'But I'll be back.'

  'Yes,' she said. 'You won't do the vanishing trick this time.'

  Without asking, she knew that he would be going to the harbour to fish. She started reading the letters, and it occurred to her that he had gone away in order to leave her on her own. He had always understood the value of being alone. For himself, first and foremost; but perhaps he had now learned to respect the needs of others as well.

  It took her two hours to read the letters. It was a painful journey into an unknown world. Henrik's world. The more she discovered, the more she realised she had never really known much about it. She had never been able to understand Aron. Now she realised that her son had been just as impenetrable. The Henrik she had known was his superficial self. His feelings for her had been genuine, he had loved her. But on the whole he had kept his thoughts concealed. This worried her as she read the letters, it was a sort of nagging jealousy that she could not shake off. Why had he not spoken to her in the way he spoke to Aron? After all, she was the one who had brought him up and taken responsibility for him while Aron had immersed himself in his computers or his drunken orgies.

  She was forced to accept this as fact. The letters annoyed her, made her feel angry with her dead son.

  Henrik spoke to Aron in a foreign language. He would present arguments, something he never did in letters to Louise; he described emotions, ideas.

  She put the letters on one side and went out. The grey sea was dancing way down below her, the parrots were hovering in the eucalyptus trees.

  I am also a split personality. To a man like Vassilis I was one person, another one to Henrik, a third one to my father, and God only knows what I have been to Aron. Slender threads hold me together. But everything is as fragile as a door suspended on rusty hinges.

  She returned to the letters. They covered a period of nine years. Occasional letters at first, then periods when they were more frequent. Henrik described his travels. He did the famous walk along the beach at Shanghai, and was fascinated by the Chinese silhouettists and their amazing skills. They somehow manage to cut out their silhouettes so that something of their subject's inner personality becomes visible. I wonder how that is possible. In November 1999 he was in Phnom Penh, on the way to Angkor Wat. Louise tried hard to remember. He had never told her about details of that journey, merely said that he had been to various places in Asia with a girlfriend. In two letters to Aron he described the girl as pretty, silent and very thin. They travelled together round the country, and were scared by the big silence after all the horrors that had taken place. I've begun to realise what I want to do with my life. I want to reduce the pain, to make my little contribution, to comprehend the big picture in the small one I see. He sometimes became emotional,
almost pathetic in his great anguish over the state of the world. But nowhere in the letters to Aron did he refer to Kennedy's missing brain. And none of the girls or women he described corresponded to Nazrin.

  What was most striking, and what hurt her most, was that Henrik never referred to her in his letters. Not a word about his mother digging away in the hot sun of Greece. No indication of their relationship, their intimacy. He renounced her through his silence. She realised that he might have avoided mentioning her out of consideration for the circumstances, but nevertheless, it felt like a betrayal. The silence tormented her.

  She forced herself to read on, keeping all her senses on the alert when she came to the last few letters. Then came what she might have been expecting subconsciously: a letter with a legible postmark. Lilongwe, Malawi, May 2004. He wrote about a shattering experience he had had in Mozambique, a visit to a place where the sick and dying were taken care of. The catastrophe is so overwhelming that one is lost for words. But most of all it is frightening. People in the Western world have no idea about what is going on. They have abandoned the last outposts of humanity without making the slightest attempt to help to protect these people, to prevent them from being infected, or to help the dying to live a dignified life, no matter how long or short it turns out to be.

  There were two more letters, both of them without envelopes. Louise assumed Henrik was back in Europe. The letters were posted on 12 and 14 June. He gave the impression of being extremely unstable: in one letter he was depressed, in the other he was in high spirits. In one letter he had given up, in the other he wrote: I have made an horrific discovery which nevertheless inspires me to act. But it also scares me.

  She read those sentences several times. What did he mean? A discovery, inspiration to act, but scared? How had Aron reacted to this letter?

  She read the letters again, tried to discover meanings between the lines, but found nothing. In the last letter, sent on 14 June, he returned one last time to his fear: I'm scared, but I shall do what I have to do.

  She stretched out on the sofa. The letters were drumming away at her temples like agitated blood.

  I only knew a small part of him. Perhaps Aron knew him better than I did. But in any case, he knew him in a totally different way.

  It was dark when Aron came back, bringing freshly caught fish. When she stood beside him in the kitchen to brush the potatoes, he suddenly took hold of her and tried to kiss her. She pulled back. It was completely unexpected, she could never have imagined that he would try to make a pass at her.

  'I thought you wanted to.'

  'Wanted to what?'

  He shrugged.

  'I don't know. I didn't mean it. I apologise.'

  'Of course you meant it. But there's no longer anything like that between us. Not on my part, at least.'

  'It won't happen again.'

  'No. It won't happen again. I haven't come here to find a man.'

  'Do you have somebody else?'

  'I think it's best if we leave our private lives out of this. Isn't that what you always used to say? That we should avoid digging too deeply into each other's souls?'

  'I did say that, and I still think it's true. Just tell me if there's somebody in your life who's there to stay.'

  'No. There is nobody.'

  'There's nobody in my life either.'

  'You don't need to answer questions I haven't asked.'

  He looked quizzically at her. Her voice was becoming shrill, accusing.

  They ate in silence. The radio was on, broadcasting an Australian news bulletin. A train crash in Darwin, a murder in Sydney.

  They drank coffee after the meal. Louise fetched the disks and the documents she had brought with her, and put them on the table in front of Aron. He looked at what she had given him, without touching it.

  He went out again, she heard the car start, and he did not return until after midnight. She had fallen asleep by then, but was woken up by the car door slamming. She heard him moving quietly around the house. She thought he had gone to bed, but then she heard the sound of the computer being switched on, and him tapping at the keyboard. She got up cautiously and peered at him through the half-open door. He had adjusted a lamp and was studying the screen. She recognised the man she used to live with. The intense concentration that made his face totally motionless. For the first time since she had met him on the pier in the rain, she felt a wave of gratitude flowing through her.

  Now he's helping me. Now I'm not on my own any more.

  She slept restlessly. She occasionally got out of bed and observed him through the half-open door. He was working at the computer, or reading Henrik's papers that she had brought with her. By four in the morning he was lying on the sofa, with his eyes open.

  Shortly before six she heard faint noises coming from the kitchen, and got up. He was standing over the cooker, making coffee.

  'Did I wake you up?'

  'No. Have you slept at all?'

  'A little bit. Enough, anyway. You know I've never needed much sleep.'

  'As I remember it you could sleep in until ten or eleven.'

  'Only when I'd been working very hard for a long time at a stretch.'

  She noticed a hint of impatience in his voice, and back-pedalled immediately.

  'How did it go?'

  'It has been a very strange experience, trying to enter into his world. I felt like a burglar. He'd erected some pretty efficient fences to keep unwanted visitors out, and I couldn't get through them. It felt like fighting a duel with my own son.'

  'What have you found out?'

  'I must have a cup of coffee first. So must you. When we lived together we had an unwritten rule, never to discuss anything seriously until we'd had a cup of coffee in dignified silence. Have you forgotten that?'

  Louise had not forgotten. Locked away in her memory was a whole rosary of silent breakfasts they had endured together.

  They drank their coffee. The parrots circled round and round over the wooden table in a shiny red swarm.

  They cleared away their cups and sat down on the sofa. She was expecting him to clasp hold of her at any moment. But he switched on the computer and waited for the screen to light up. It eventually did so to the accompaniment of a furious drum roll.

  'He's made this music himself. It's not too difficult to do if you are a computer professional, but it's pretty hard for a normal computer user. Did Henrik have any IT tuition?'

  You don't know because you were never there. In his letters to you he never wrote about what he was working on, or what he was studying. He knew that you weren't really interested.

  'Not as far as I know.'

  'What did he do? He wrote that he was studying, but he never said what.'

  'He read theology in Lund for one term. Then he got bored. After that he qualified as a taxi driver, and earned his living by erecting venetian blinds.'

  'Could he really make a living out of that?'

  'He was very thrifty, even when he was on his travels. He used to say that he didn't want to make up his mind what work he was going to take up until he was absolutely certain. In any case, he didn't work with computers, although he did use them, of course. What have you found?'

  'Nothing at all, really.'