Kennedy's Brain

by Henning Mankell

  'What had you been talking about previously?'

  'Nothing. We'd been asleep. When I opened my eyes I saw him there by the window.'

  'Why did he speak about an artist?'

  'I've no idea. Perhaps he'd dreamt something.'

  'What happened afterwards?'

  'Nothing. He came back to bed.'

  'Was that the only time he spoke about this artist and a painting?'

  'He never mentioned either again.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Yes. But I realised afterwards that the meeting on Inhaca had been very important for him.'

  'How can you be so sure?'

  'His tone of voice as he stood there by the window. I think he really wanted to tell me something. But he couldn't bring himself to do it.'

  'I must find that artist. How do you get to Inhaca? By boat?'

  'That takes ages. It's best to fly. It will only take ten minutes.'

  'Can you come with me?'

  Lucinda shook her head.

  'I have a family to look after. But I can help you to book a room at the hotel, and drive you to the airport. I think there are flights to Inhaca twice a day.'

  Louise hesitated. It was too vague. But she had to follow up every possibility, she had no choice. She tried to imagine what Aron would have done. But Aron had nothing to say. He had vanished.

  She gathered together a few clothes in a plastic bag, dug out her passport and some money, and she was ready to leave. She told Celina she'd be away until the next day, but did not mention where she was going to.

  Lucinda drove her to the airport. The heat lay over Maputo like a stifling blanket.

  'Ask for help at the hotel. There's a receptionist with a limp. He's called Zé. Pass on greetings from me, and he'll do what he can for you,' said Lucinda.

  'Does he speak English?'

  'Not very well. Never assume that he's understood what you say to him. Always ask again, to be on the safe side.'

  When they reached the airport they were immediately besieged by boys who wanted to wash or guard the car. Lucinda declined their offers, patiently and without raising her voice.

  Before long she had established that the next flight to Inhaca would leave in just over an hour, and after a quick telephone call she was able to inform Louise that a room had been booked for her.

  'I took it for just the one night, but you can extend that if you want. It's not high season at the moment.'

  'You mean it can get hotter than it is now?'

  'It can get cooler. That's what those who can afford holidays are interested in.'

  There was a café over the terminal. They drank soda water and ate a few sandwiches. Lucinda pointed out the rather battered-looking propeller-driven aeroplane that would take Louise to Inhaca.

  'You mean I'm going to fly in that wreck?'

  'The pilots used to fly fighter planes. They're very good.'

  'How do you know? Are you acquainted with them?'

  Lucinda laughed.

  'I don't think you need to worry.'

  Lucinda went with her to the check-in. Besides Louise there were two other passengers: an African woman with a baby in a carrier on her back, and a European man with a book in his hand.

  'Perhaps this trip will be a complete waste of time.'

  'At least you'll be completely safe on Inhaca. Nobody will mug you. You can walk along the beaches without feeling frightened.'

  'I'll be back tomorrow.'

  'Unless you decide to stay longer.'

  'Why should I do that?'

  'Who knows?'

  The passengers walked to the aircraft through the extreme heat. Louise felt dizzy and was afraid of fainting. She took a deep breath and clung tightly onto the rail by the stairs. She sat as far back as possible. Diagonally in front of her was the man with the book.

  Had she seen him before? His face was unfamiliar, but she seemed to recognise his back. Her fear came out of nowhere. She told herself that she was imagining things. She had no reason to be afraid of him. He was merely a delusion deep down in her brain.

  The plane took off and circled round the white city before heading out to sea. Far down below she could see fishing boats with triangular sails, moving unsteadily through the waves. The aeroplane began its descent almost immediately, and five minutes after taking off its wheels thudded down on the runway at Inhaca. It was very short, and weeds were growing through cracks in the tarmac.

  Louise emerged into the heat. She and the man with the book sat in a trailer and were towed by a tractor to their hotel. The woman with the child disappeared on foot into the tall grass. The man looked up from his book and smiled at her. She smiled back.

  When they arrived at the hotel she asked the young man in reception if his name was Zé.

  'He's off today. He'll be back on duty tomorrow.'

  She felt frustrated, but thrust any such thoughts aside. She had no desire to waste energy on getting annoyed.

  She was shown to her room, emptied her plastic bag and stretched out on the bed. But lying there was not an attractive option. She walked down to the beach. It was low tide. A few decrepit-looking fishing boats lay on their sides on the sand like beached whales. She waded into the water, and gazed out into the heat haze where a group of men were pulling in nets.

  She spent several hours paddling in the warm water. Her head was a vacuum.

  As dusk fell she took dinner in the hotel dining room. She had fish, drank wine and was tipsy by the time she got back to her room. She lay on the bed and called Aron's mobile. The phone rang, but nobody answered. She texted him: I could do with your help now. It was like sending a message out into the void, without having the slightest idea if anybody would ever receive it.

  She fell asleep, but woke up with a start. A sound had disturbed her. She listened into the darkness. Had the sound come from her? Had she been awakened by her own snoring? She switched on the bedside light. Eleven o'clock. She left the light on, adjusted the pillows, and established the fact that she was wide awake. She no longer felt the slightest bit drunk.

  A memory forced its way into her head. It was a drawing Henrik had made when his teenage problems had been at their worst. He had been unapproachable, hidden away in an invisible cave to which she had no access. She had hated being a teenager, a time of freckles and complexes, of suicidal thoughts and a maudlin fury at the injustices of this world. Henrik was her opposite. He suppressed everything. But one day he had emerged from his cave and without saying a word had placed a drawing on the kitchen table. The whole page was coloured blood red, with a black shadow starting to spread from the bottom part of the drawing. That was all. He had never elaborated on the drawing, nor explained why he had given it to her. But she thought she had understood the point.

  Passion and despair, constantly at war, a duel to the bitter end, and when life was over, neither triumphant.

  She still had the drawing. It was in an old clothes chest in Artur's house.

  Had Henrik ever sent drawings to Aron? That was another of the questions she would have liked to ask him.

  The air conditioning hummed faintly, an insect with many legs crawled slowly and methodically, upside down, over the ceiling.

  Once again she tried to think through everything that had happened. She retraced her steps, with all her senses on the alert, to see if she could now detect a context and an explanation for why Henrik was dead. She moved gingerly, and it seemed to her as if Aron was lying by her side. He was close to her now, as close as the period at the beginning of their marriage when they had been in love, and always been careful to ensure that they never strayed too far apart from each other.

  It was to Aron that she tried to formulate her thoughts, as if in a conversation or a letter. If he was still alive he would gather that she was trying to understand, and he would help her to interpret what as yet she had only vague suspicions about.

  Henrik died in his bed in Stockholm with barbiturates in his body. He was wearing pyjamas,
and the sheet had been pulled up to his chin. That was the end for Henrik. But did the story continue? Was his death nothing more than a link in a long chain? He discovered something here in Africa, among the dying at Xai-Xai. Something that made his brief joy, or rather the vanished depression as Nazrin put it, change into fear. But there was also an element of fury, a desire on Henrik's part to stir up a revolt. A revolt against what? Something inside himself? The thought that his ideas, his brain were being stolen or hidden away just like Kennedy's brain after the murder in Dallas? Or was he the one trying to force his way into somebody else's brain?

  Louise plodded on. It was like forcing one's way through the forests around Sveg, where fallen branches and saplings sometimes made it impossible to make progress.

  He had a flat in Barcelona that nobody knew about, and access to a lot of money. He collected articles about the blackmailing of people afflicted with Aids. He felt more and more frightened. Why was he frightened? Because he had realised too late that he had strayed into dangerous territory? Had he seen something he ought not to have seen? Had somebody noticed him, or managed to read his intentions?

  Something was missing. Henrik was always on his own, despite having a lot of people around him: Nazrin, Lucinda, Nuno da Silva, his incomprehensible friendship with Lars Håkansson. But he is on his own even so. These people rarely occur in his notes, he hardly ever mentions them.

  There must have been more people. Henrik was not a loner. Who were these other people? Were they in Barcelona or Africa? He often used to talk to me about the amazing electronic world that enabled people to create networks and alliances with people from all over the real world.

  She was not convinced, the ice was too thin, she kept on falling through. I'm too impatient. I speak before having listened properly. I must keep on searching for new fragments. There's still time to start piecing them together and to try and find a pattern.

  She drank some water from a bottle she had taken with her from the restaurant. The insect on the ceiling was no longer there. She closed her eyes.

  She was woken up by the telephone ringing. There was a flashing of lights and vibrations on her bedside table. She answered half asleep. There was a crackling noise from the static, somebody was listening. Then the connection was broken off.

  It was shortly after midnight. She sat up. Who had called her? The silence had no identity. She could hear faint music coming from the hotel bar. She decided to go there. If she had a glass or two of wine she would be able to go back to sleep.

  The bar was almost deserted. An elderly European man sat in a corner with a young African woman. Louise felt uncomfortable. She pictured the overweight man lying naked on top of the black woman who could hardly have been more than seventeen or eighteen years old. Was this the kind of thing Lucinda had been forced to endure? Had Henrik seen the same kind of thing that she was observing now?

  She drank two glasses of wine without a pause, signed the bill and left the bar. The night breeze was mild. She passed the swimming pool and left the area illuminated by lights from the hotel windows. She had never seen a sky like the one that confronted her now. She thought she had eventually pinned down the Southern Cross. Aron had once described it as 'the saviour of seafarers in the southern hemisphere'. He was always surprising her with unsuspected knowledge. Henrik sometimes also took a whimsical interest in the unexpected. At the age of nine he had talked about running away from school to the wild horses of the Kirghistan steppes. But then decided to stay at home after all as he did not want to leave his mother on her own. Another time he had stated loud and clear that he wanted to go to sea and learn how to sail a boat all by himself. Not in order to sail round the world in record time nor to demonstrate that he could survive such a journey. His dream was to be alone on a boat for ten, perhaps twenty years without ever landing anywhere.

  Her grief returned. Henrik never became a sailor, nor did he ever go looking for wild horses on the steppes of Kirghistan. But he was on the way to becoming a Good Man when somebody dressed him in pyjamas instead of a funeral shroud.

  She was on the sands now. It was high tide, breakers were rolling in towards the shore. Darkness swallowed the contours of the beached fishing boats. She took off her sandals and walked to the water's edge. The heat took her back in her mind to Peloponnisos. She was overwhelmed by a tidal wave, a longing to return to her work in the dusty graves, to her colleagues, the eager but careless students, her Greek friends. She felt the urge to stand in the shadows outside Mitsos's house and smoke one of her nocturnal cigarettes while the dogs barked and the gramophone churned out its melancholy Greek music.

  A crab crawled over her foot. In the distance she could see the lights from Maputo. Once again Aron came to haunt her: Light can travel long distances over dark water. Imagine light as a wanderer who could be fleeing from you, or coming closer and closer. In the light you discover both your friends and your enemies.

  Aron had said something more, but she couldn't remember what.

  She held her breath. There was somebody there in the night, somebody watching her. She turned round, lights from the bar in the far distance puncturing the darkness. She was scared stiff, her heart was pounding.

  She started screaming, shrieking into the dark until she saw torches coming from the hotel. When she was pinned down in the beam from one of them, she froze like an animal caught in headlights.

  Two men had come to investigate, the very young man from reception and one of the bartenders. They asked why she had screamed: was she injured? Had she been bitten by a snake?

  She merely shook her head, took the receptionist's torch and shone it round the beach. Nobody. But there had been somebody there. She had felt it.

  They walked back to the hotel. The young man from reception accompanied her to her room. She lay down on the bed, prepared to lie awake all night. But she managed to fall asleep. The red parrots from Apollo Bay came flying into her dreams. There were masses of them, a huge flock, and their wingbeats were totally silent.

  CHAPTER 17

  The sky was hidden behind damp mist when she went down to the dining room for breakfast. The man on duty in reception was somebody she had not seen before. She asked if he was Zé.

  'José,' he said. 'Shortened to Zé.'

  Louise mentioned Lucinda, and asked him if there was anybody on the island who painted pictures.

  'That can only be Adelinho. Nobody else here on the island paints, nobody else orders parcels of paint from Maputo. Many years ago he used to mix his own paints, from roots, leaves and soil. They are remarkable pictures – dolphins, dancing girls, sometimes distorted faces that can make you feel sick.'

  'Where does he live?'

  'It's too far to walk, but Ricardo, who collected you from the airport, will drive you there for a small fee.'

  'I'd like to pay a visit to Adelo.'

  'Adelinho. Learn his name. He's become vain since his paintings have been in demand. I'll ask Ricardo to pick you up here an hour from now.'

  'Half an hour will be long enough for my breakfast.'

  'But not for Ricardo. He insists that his old jeep should be thoroughly cleaned before he can undertake a journey with a beautiful woman. He'll be waiting for you outside the entrance in an hour's time.'

  Louise had her breakfast outside, at a table in the shade of a tree. In the swimming pool a man was swimming slowly, length after length. A shaggy dog came to lie down at her feet. An African elkhound. A reminder of the dogs I used to play with as a child. Now I have a father who's just as hairy as you.