Kennedy's Brain

by Henning Mankell

  She paused to contemplate a man lying in front of her. He was looking at her, his eyes gleaming. She bent down and put her hand on his forehead. He did not have a temperature. The feeling of being in an opium den rather than in death's waiting room increased. The man suddenly started moving his lips. She leaned forward to hear what he said. His breath was poisonous, but she forced herself to bear it. He was repeating the same phrases, time after time. She could not understand what he said, over and over again, like a mantra, just something that started with 'In . . .' and perhaps also the word 'them'.

  She heard a door opening. Then the man in the bunk bed reacted as if he had been punched. He turned his face away and curled up. When she touched his shoulder he gave a start and drew away.

  Louise sensed somebody standing behind her. She turned round, as if afraid of being attacked. It was a woman, of about her own age, grey-haired. She peered short-sightedly at Louise.

  'I didn't know we had visitors?'

  The woman's accent reminded Louise of when she visited Scotland, and met Aron for the first time.

  'I've been here before, and was told that everybody is welcome.'

  'And everybody is welcome. It's simply that we prefer to open doors ourselves for visitors. The rooms are dark, there are thresholds, people can stumble. We show our guests round.'

  'I had a son who used to work here, Henrik. Did you know him?'

  'I wasn't here then. But everybody speaks highly of him.'

  'I'm trying to understand what Henrik did here.'

  'We look after sick people. We take care of patients that nobody else bothers about. The helpless.'

  The woman who had yet to introduce herself, took Louise by the arm and led her to the exit. She is being gentle with me, but the claws are there, Louise thought.

  They emerged into the bright sunshine. The black dog was lying in the shade of a tree, panting.

  'I'd like to meet Christian Holloway. My son spoke about him with great respect. He adored him.'

  Louise felt uneasy about lying in Henrik's name, but she felt obliged to do so if she was going to get any further.

  'I'm sure he will get in touch with you.'

  'When? I can't stay here for ever, doesn't he have a telephone?'

  'I've never heard of anybody speaking to him on the telephone. I have to go now.'

  'Can't I stay and watch you at work?'

  The woman shook her head.

  'Today's not a good day. It's treatment day.'

  'That would be an especially good time.'

  'We are responsible for seriously ill people, and we can't just let anybody wander around when we're busy.'

  Louise could see that she was wasting her time.

  'Would I be wrong in thinking you come from Scotland?'

  'From the Highlands.'

  'What brought you here?'

  The woman smiled.

  'Roads don't always lead to where you think.'

  She shook hands and said goodbye. The conversation was over. Louise went back to the car. The black dog watched her longingly, as if it would also have liked to leave. Louise could see the grey-haired woman in the rear-view mirror. She was waiting for Louise to drive off.

  She returned to the hotel. The albino sat in the empty dining room playing his xylophone. Children were playing in the sand with the remains of a dustbin. They were beating the bin as if giving it a good hiding. The man in reception smiled. He was reading a well-thumbed Bible. She felt dizzy, everything was so unreal. She went up to her room and lay down on the bed.

  Her stomach was in uproar. She could feel it coming and managed to get to the toilet before it came gushing out of her. She had barely returned to bed before she was forced to hasten up again. An hour later, she was running a temperature. When the cleaner came, Louise managed to explain that she was ill, and needed bottled water and would then like to be left in peace. An hour later a waiter from the dining room appeared with a small bottle of mineral water. She gave him some money and asked him to return with a large bottle.

  She spent the rest of the day running backwards and forwards between the bed and the toilet. By dusk she had no strength left. But the attacks seemed to be receding. She managed to get up on shaky legs and go down to the dining room to drink tea.

  She was about to leave when the whispering man in the dark room came back into her consciousness.

  He wanted to speak to me. He wanted me to listen. He was ill, but much more than that, he was scared. He turned away from me as if to emphasise that he hadn't made contact.

  He wanted to talk to me. Behind those glittering eyes of his was something different.

  It suddenly dawned on her what he had been trying to say.

  Injections. That was the word he had been trying to whisper. Injections. But surely injections were part of their treatment?

  He was scared. He wanted to tell me it was the injections that scared him.

  The man had been seeking help. His whispers had been a cry for help.

  She went to the window and looked down at the sea. The strip of light reflected from the moon had gone. The sea lay in darkness. The gravelled area in front of the hotel was lit up by a single bulb in a lamp post.

  She peered into the shadows. Henrik had done the same. What had he discovered?

  Perhaps a whispering man in death's waiting room?

  CHAPTER 18

  The next day, early morning again.

  Louise wrapped the length of fabric round her body and went down to the beach. Some of the small fishing boats came in with their catches. Women and children helped to sort the fish, pack them into plastic buckets filled with ice, then carry them off balanced on their heads. A boy grinned broadly as he showed her a large crab. Louise smiled back.

  She waded out into the water. The fabric clung to her body. She swam a few strokes, then dived. When she came up to the surface again she had decided to go back to the dying man on the bunk at Xai-Xai. She would not give up until she had understood what he had wanted to tell her.

  She rinsed away the salt under the dripping shower in her bathroom. The albino was still playing his xylophone. The sound drifted in through the window. He always seemed to be there, playing his instrument. She had noticed that the bright sun had scarred his forehead and cheeks.

  She went down to the dining room. The waiter smiled and served her coffee. She nodded towards the man playing the instrument.

  'Is he always here?'

  'He likes to play. He goes home late and comes back early. His wife wakes him up.'

  'So he has a family?'

  The waiter looked at her in surprise.

  'Why not? He has nine children and more grandchildren than he can keep count of.'

  I don't. I don't have a family. There's nothing after Henrik.

  She experienced a feeling of helpless fury over the fact that Henrik no longer existed.

  She left the breakfast table. The relentless monotony of the music resounded inside her head.

  She went to the car and drove to Christian Holloway's village. It was even hotter now than the day before. The thumping inside her head replaced the monotonous music.

  When she pulled up it seemed as if everything was repeating itself in the heat haze. The air was dancing before her eyes. The black dog was panting underneath a tree. There was no sign of any people. A plastic bag was being blown back and forth over the sands. Louise sat behind the wheel and fanned herself with her hand. Her fury had faded away, to be replaced by resignation.

  That night she had dreamt about Aron. It had been a painful nightmare. She had been busy with one of her digs at Angolis. They had exposed a skeleton, and it had suddenly dawned on her that it was Aron's bones they had discovered. She had tried desperately to break free from the dream, but it had clung on to her and pulled her down. She had not woken up until she had been on the point of suffocating.

  A white man dressed in light-coloured clothes came out of one building and entered another. Louise continued
fanning herself as she watched him. Then she left the car and headed for the building she had been in the previous day. The dog watched her.

  She stepped into the darkness, stood motionless until her eyes had grown used to the dark. The stench was even more potent than last time. She started breathing through her mouth so as not to be sick.

  The bunk was empty. The man was no longer there. Had she lost her bearings? There had been a woman next to him, lying under a batik cover with a flamingo motif. She was still there. Louise had not become disorientated. She wandered around the room, being careful not to stand on any of the emaciated bodies. There was no sign of him. Had he been moved? Could he be dead? Something inside her rebelled at that thought. Death could come quickly to anybody suffering from Aids, but even so, something did not seem right.

  She was about to leave the room when she had the feeling that she was being watched. All around her was a circle of slowly moving arms and legs. Many of the afflicted had covered their heads with sheets and quilts, as if keeping their misery to themselves. Louise looked round. Somebody was watching her. In one corner of the room she observed a man leaning against the stone wall looking at her. She approached him cautiously. He was a young man, about Henrik's age, though emaciated, his face covered in sores, and patches of his head without hair. He was looking at her without blinking. A slight movement of one hand suggested that she was welcome to come closer.

  'Moises has gone.'

  His English had a South African accent, she had picked that up after listening to her white fellow passengers on the bus from the airport to her hotel. She knelt down in order to hear his weak voice.

  'Where is he?' she asked.

  'In the ground.'

  'Is he dead?'

  The man grasped her wrist. It was as if a little girl had taken hold of her. His fingers were thin, weak.

  'They fetched him.'

  'What do you mean?'

  His face moved closer to hers.

  'You killed him. He tried to appeal to you.'

  'I couldn't understand what he said.'

  'They gave him an injection and took him away. He was asleep when they came.'

  'What happened?'

  'I can't speak here. They'll see us. They'll fetch me in the same way. Where are you staying?'

  'I'm in the hotel on the beach.'

  'If I can make it, I'll go there. Leave now.'

  The man lay down and curled up under a blanket. The same fear. He's hiding. She went back through the room. When she emerged into the sunshine it was like being hit hard in the face. She kept in the shade.

  Henrik had told her once about his experiences of hot countries. People didn't only share water with their brothers and sisters, but also shade.

  Had she understood the man in the darkness rightly? Would he really be able to visit her? How would he get to the beach outside her hotel?

  She was about to go back when she noticed that there was somebody standing in the shade of the tree where she had parked her car. It was a man in his sixties, perhaps older. He smiled as she approached. He came towards her and stretched out his hand.

  She knew immediately who he was. His English was unabrasive. His American accent had disappeared almost completely.

  'My name's Christian Holloway. As I understand it, you are Henrik Cantor's mother, and he has died under tragic circumstances.'

  Louise was confused. Who had told him that?

  He sensed her confusion immediately.

  'News, especially tragic news, spreads very quickly. What happened?'

  'He was murdered.'

  'Can that really be true? Who would want to harm a young man who had dreams of a better world?'

  'That's what I'm trying to find out.'

  Holloway touched her lightly on the arm.

  'Let's go to my office. It's much cooler than out here.'

  They walked over the gravel towards a white house some way away from the rest. The black dog watched their progress intently.

  'When I was a child I used to spend my winter holidays with an uncle in Alaska. It was my far-sighted father who sent me there, to toughen me up. The whole of my childhood and youth was really a sort of continuous toughening-up process. Learning things, knowledge, was not considered to be any more important than acquiring "an iron skin", as my father called it. It was very cold where my uncle lived and worked, drilling for oil. But getting used to extreme cold has made me better equipped than many to withstand extreme heat as well.'

  They entered a house which comprised just one large room. It was built like an African rondavel, intended for a chieftain. Holloway kicked off his shoes outside the door, as if he were about to enter a holy place. But he shook his head when Louise bent down to unfasten her laces.

  She looked round, taking in details of the room as if she were visiting a newly excavated tomb in which reality had remained untouched for thousands of years.

  The room was furnished in what she imagined was classical colonial style. In one corner was a computer with two screens. On the stone floor was an antique carpet, Persian or Afghan, expensive.

  Her attention was attracted to one of the walls. There was a picture of the Madonna hanging on it. She saw immediately that it was very old, originating from the Byzantine age, presumably early. It was far too valuable to be hanging on the wall of a private house somewhere in Africa.

  Holloway saw what she was looking at.

  'Madonna and child. For me they are constant companions. Religions have always imitated life, the divine always stems from the human. You can find a beautiful child in the most horrific slum in Dhaka or Medellín, a mathematical genius can be born in Harlem as the son or daughter of a crack addict. The thought that Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave in Vienna is really not so much shocking as uplifting. Everything is possible. We can learn from the Tibetans that every religion ought to place its gods in our midst, and let us find out about them. It's among human beings that we should find divine inspiration.'

  He never took his eyes off her as he talked. They were blue, bright and cool. He invited her to sit down. A door opened without a sound. An African dressed in white entered and served tea.

  The door closed. It was as if a white shadow had flitted through the room.

  'Henrik made himself well liked in no time at all,' said Holloway. 'He was clever, and managed to shake off the distaste that affects everybody who is young and healthy when they are forced to come into contact with death. Nobody likes to be reminded of what lies in store for us just round the corner that is closer than we think. Life is an incredibly short journey, it's only in one's youth that it is eternal. But Henrik got used to it. Then all of a sudden, he disappeared. We never understood why he left.'

  'I found him dead in his flat. He had his pyjamas on. That's how I knew he had been murdered.'

  'Because of the pyjamas?'

  'He always slept naked.'