Kurt Wallander Series
FACELESS KILLERS
THE DOGS OF RIGA
THE WHITE LIONESS
THE MAN WHO SMILED
SIDETRACKED
THE FIFTH WOMAN
ONE STEP BEHIND
FIREWALL
BEFORE THE FROST
THE PYRAMID
THE TROUBLED MAN
AN EVENT IN AUTUMN
Fiction
THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER
CHRONICLER OF THE WINDS
DEPTHS
KENNEDY’S BRAIN
THE EYE OF THE LEOPARD
ITALIAN SHOES
THE MAN FROM BEIJING
DANIEL
THE SHADOW GIRLS
A TREACHEROUS PARADISE
Non-fiction
I DIE, BUT THE MEMORY LIVES ON
QUICKSAND
Young Adult Fiction
A BRIDGE TO THE STARS
SHADOWS IN THE TWILIGHT
WHEN THE SNOW FELL
THE JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Children’s Fiction
THE CAT WHO LIKED RAIN
Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473524903
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VINTAGE
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Copyright © Henning Mankell 2015
Published by agreement with Leopard Förlag, Stockholm and Leonhardt & Høier Literary Agency A/S, Copenhagen.
English translation copyright © Marlaine Delargy 2017
Cover photographs© Getty Images
Henning Mankell has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Harvill Secker in 2017
First published with the title Svenska gummistövlar in Sweden by Leopard Förlag in 2015
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
To Elise
This is a freestanding continuation of Italian Shoes, which was first published in 2006. This narrative takes place eight years later.
Much has he learned who knows sorrow.
From The Song of Roland
My house burned down on an autumn night almost a year ago. It was a Sunday. The wind had got up during the afternoon and by the evening the anemometer indicated that the gusts measured over twenty metres per second.
The wind was coming from the north and was very chilly in spite of the fact that it was still early autumn. When I went to bed at around half past ten I thought that this would be the first storm of the season, moving in across the island I had inherited from my maternal grandparents.
Soon it would be winter. One night the sea would slowly begin to ice over.
That was the first night I wore socks to bed. The cold was tightening its grip.
The previous month, with some difficulty, I had managed to fix the roof. It was a big job for a small workman. Many of the slates were old and cracked. My hands, which had once held a scalpel during complex surgical procedures, were not made for manipulating broken tiles.
Ture Jansson, who had spent his entire working life as the postman out here in the islands before he retired, agreed to fetch the new slates from the harbour although he refused to accept any payment. As I have set up an improvised surgery in my boathouse in order to deal with all his imaginary medical complaints, perhaps he thought he ought to return the favour.
For years now I have stood there on the jetty by the boathouse examining his allegedly painful arms and back. I have brought out the stethoscope which hangs beside a decoy duck and established that his heart and lungs sound absolutely fine. In every single examination I have found Jansson to be in the best of health. His fear of these imaginary ailments has been so extreme that I have never seen anything like it in all my years as a doctor. He was simultaneously the postman and a full-time hypochondriac.
On one occasion he insisted he had toothache, at which point I refused to have anything to do with his problem. I don’t know whether he went to see a dentist on the mainland or not. I wonder if he’s ever had a single cavity. Perhaps he was in the habit of grinding his teeth while he was asleep, and that’s what caused the pain?
On the night of the fire I had taken a sleeping tablet as usual and dropped off almost immediately.
I was woken by a light being switched on. When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by a dazzling brightness. Beneath the ceiling of my bedroom I could see a band of grey smoke. I must have pushed off my socks in my sleep when the room got hot. I leaped out of bed, ran down the stairs and into the kitchen through that harsh, searing light. The clock on the wall was showing nineteen minutes past midnight. I grabbed my black raincoat from the hook by the back door, pulled on my wellington boots, one of which was almost impossible to get my foot into, and rushed outside.
The house was already in flames, the fire roaring. I had to go down to the jetty and the boathouse before the heat became unbearable. During those first few minutes I didn’t even think about what had caused this disastrous conflagration; I just watched as the impossible unfolded before my eyes. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would be smashed to pieces inside my chest. The fire was ravaging me in equal measure.
Time melted away in the heat. Boats began to arrive from the other islands and skerries, the residents rudely woken from their sleep, but afterwards I was unable to say how long it took or who was there. My gaze was fixed on the flames, the sparks whirling up into the night sky. For one terrifying moment I thought I saw the elderly figures of my grandmother and my grandfather standing on the far side of the fire.
There are not many of us out here on the islands in the autumn, when the summer visitors disappear and the last of the yachts return to their home harbours, wherever those might be. But someone had seen the glow of the fire in the darkness, the message had been passed along, and everyone wanted to help. The coastguard’s firefighting equipment was used to pump up seawater and spray it on the burning building, but it was too late. All it changed was the smell. Charred oak timbers and wall panels, burned wallpaper and linoleum flooring combined with salt water to give off an unforgettable stench. When dawn broke all that remained was a smoking, stinking ruin. The wind had dropped – the storm had already moved on, heading towards the Gulf of Finland – but it had fulfilled its spiteful task, working together with the blaze, and now there was nothing left of my grandparents’ pretty house.
That was when I first thought to ask myself: how had the fire broken out? I hadn’t lit any candles or left any of the old paraffin lamps burning. I hadn’t had a cigarette or used the wood-burning stove. The electrical wiring throughout the house had been renewed just a few years ago.
It was as if the house had set fire to itself.
As if a house could commit suicide as a result of weariness, old age and sorrow.
I realised I had been mistaken about a key aspect of my life. After performing an operation that went disastrously wrong and led to a young woman losing her arm, I moved out here many years ago. Back then I often thought that the house in which I was living had been here on the day when I was born, and that it would still be here on the day when I no longer existed.
But I was mistaken. The oak trees, the birches, the alders and the single ash tree would remain here after I was gone, but of my beautiful home in the archipelago only the foundations, hauled to the island across the ice from the long-defunct quarry at Håkansborg, would remain.
My train of thought was interrupted as Jansson appeared beside me. He was bare-headed, wearing very old dark blue overalls and a pair of motorcycle gloves that I recognised from the winters when the ice had not been thick enough to drive across, and he had used his hydrocopter to deliver the post.
He was staring at my old green wellingtons. When I looked down I realised I had pulled on two left boots in my haste. Now I understood why it had been so difficult to put one of them on.
‘I’ll bring you a boot,’ Jansson said. ‘I’ve got a few pairs back at home.’
‘There might be a spare pair down in the boathouse,’ I suggested.
‘No. I’ve been to look. There are some leather shoes and some old crampons people used to fix onto their boots when they went out on the ice clubbing seals.’
The fact that Jansson had already been rooting around in my boathouse shouldn’t have surprised me, even if on this occasion he had done it out of consideration. I already knew that he was in the habit of going in there. Jansson was a snooper. From an early stage I had been convinced that he read every postcard that passed through his hands when the summer visitors bought their stamps down by the jetties.
He looked at me with tired eyes. It had been a long night.
‘Where will you live? What are you going to do now?’
I didn’t reply because I didn’t have an answer.
I shuffled closer to the smoking ruin. The boot on my right foot was chafing. This is what I own now, I thought. Two wellingtons that aren’t even a pair. Everything else is gone. I don’t even have any clothes.
At that moment, as I grasped the full extent of the disaster that had befallen me, it was as if a howl swept through my body. But I heard nothing. Everything that happened within me was soundless.
Jansson appeared beside me once more. He has a curious way of moving, as if he has paws instead of feet. He comes from nowhere and suddenly materialises. He seems to know how to stay out of another person’s field of vision all the time.
Why hadn’t his wretched house on Stångskär burned down instead?
Jansson gave a start as if he had picked up on my embittered thought, but then I realised I had pulled a face, and he thought it was because he had come too close.
‘You can come and stay with me, of course,’ he offered when he had recovered his equilibrium.
‘Thank you.’
Then I noticed my daughter Louise’s caravan, which was behind Jansson in a grove of alders alongside a tall oak tree that had not yet lost all its leaves. The caravan was still partly concealed by its low branches.
‘I’ve got the caravan,’ I said. ‘I can live there for the time being.’
Jansson looked surprised but didn’t say anything.
All the people who had turned up during the night were starting to head back to their boats, but before they left they came over to say they were happy to help with whatever I needed.
During the course of a few hours my life had changed so completely that I actually needed everything.
I didn’t even have a matching pair of wellingtons.
I watched as one boat after another disappeared, the sounds of the different engines gradually dying away.
I knew who each person was out here in the archipelago. There are two dominant families: the Hanssons and the Westerlunds. Many of them are sworn enemies who meet up only at funerals or when there is a fire or a tragedy at sea. At such times all animosity is set aside, only to be resurrected as soon as normal circumstances resume.
I will never be a part of the community in which they live despite all those long-running feuds. My grandfather came from one of the smaller families out here, the Lundbergs, and they always managed to steer clear of any conflict. In addition, he married a woman who came from the distant shores of Åland.
My origins lie here in the islands, and yet I do not belong. I am a runaway doctor who hid in the home I inherited. My medical expertise is an undoubted advantage, but I will never be a true islander.
Besides, everyone knows that I am a winter bather. Every morning I open up the hole I have made in the ice and take a dip. This is regarded with deep suspicion by the permanent residents. Most of them think I’m crazy.
Thanks to Jansson I knew that people were puzzled by the life I led. What did I do, out here all alone on my island? I didn’t fish, I wasn’t a part of the local history association or any other organisation. I didn’t hunt, nor did I appear to have any interest in repairing my dilapidated boathouse or the jetty, which had been badly affected by the ice over the past few winters.
So, as I said, the few remaining permanent residents out here regarded me with a certain measure of distrust. The summer visitors, however, who heard about the retired doctor, thought how fortunate I was to be able to retire to the tranquillity of the archipelago and escape the noise and chaos of the city.
The previous year an impressive motor launch had moored at my jetty. I went down to chase the unwanted visitors away, but a man and a woman carried ashore a crying child who had erupted in a rash. They had heard about the doctor living on the island and were obviously very worried, so I opened up my boathouse clinic. The child was placed on the bench next to the area where my grandfather’s fishing nets still hung, and I was soon able to establish that it was nothing more than a harmless nettle rash. I asked a few questions and concluded that the child had had an allergic reaction after eating freshly picked strawberries.
I went up to my kitchen and fetched a non-prescription antihistamine. They wanted to pay me of course, but I refused. I stood on the jetty and watched as their ostentatious pleasure craft disappeared behind Höga Tryholmen.
I always keep a good store of medication for my own private use, and several oxygen cylinders. I am no hypochondriac, but I do want access to drugs when necessary. I don’t want to risk waking up one night to find that I am having a heart attack without being able to administer at least the same treatment as I would receive in an ambulance.
I believe that other doctors are just as afraid of dying as I am. Today I look back and regret the decision I made when I was fifteen years old to enter the medical profession. Today I find it easier to understand my father, a permanently exhausted waiter; he looked at me with displeasure and asked if I seriously thought that hacking away at other people’s bodies was a satisfactory choice in life.
At the time I told him I was convinced that I was doing the right thing, but I never revealed that I didn’t think I had any chance whatsoever of gaining the qualifications to train as a doctor. When I succeeded, much to my own astonishment, I couldn’t go back on my word.
That’s the truth: I became a doctor because I had told my father that was what I was going to do. If he had died before I completed my training, I would have given up immediately.
I can’t imagine what I would have done with my life instead; I would probably have moved out here at an earlier stage, but I have no idea how I would have earned a living.
The last boats disappeared into the morning mist. The sea, the islands, greyer than ever. Only Jansson and I were left. The stinking ruin was still smoking, the odd flame flaring up from the collapsed oak beams. I pulled my raincoat more tightly over my pyjamas and walked around the remains of my house. One of the apple trees my grandfather had planted was a charred skeleton; it looked like something from a theatre set. The intense heat had melted a metal water butt, and the grass was burned to a crisp.
I felt an almost irresistible desire to scream, but as long as Jansson stubbornly hung around, I couldn’t do it. Nor did I have the strength to get rid of him. Whatever happened, I realised that I was going to need his help.
I rejoined him.
‘Can you do something for me?’ I said. ‘I need a mobile phone. I left mine in the house, so it’s gone.’
‘I’ve got a spare one at home that you can borrow,’ Jansson replied.
‘Just until I manage to get a new one.’
Obviously I needed the phone as soon as possible, so Jansson went down to his boat. It’s one of the last in the archipelago that has a so-called hot bulb engine, which has to be started with a blowtorch. He had a faster boat when he used to deliver the post, but the day after he retired he sold it and started using the old wooden boat he had inherited from his father. I have heard everything about that boat, including how it was built in a little boatyard in Västervik in 1923 and still has its original engine.
I stayed where I was, beside the smoking ruin. I heard Jansson spin the flywheel. He stuck his head out of the wheelhouse hatch as he waved goodbye.
Everything was quiet in the aftermath of the storm. There was a crow sitting in a tree contemplating the ruin. I picked up a stone and threw it at the bird, which flapped away on weary wings.
Then I went over to the caravan. I sat down on the bed and was overwhelmed by sorrow and pain, by a despair that I could feel all the way down to my toes. It made me hot, like a fever. I let out a yell so loud that the walls of the caravan seemed to bulge outwards. I began to weep. I hadn’t cried like that since I was a child.
I lay down and stared at the damp patch on the ceiling, which to my eyes now resembled a foetus. The whole of my childhood had been shot through with an ever-present fear of being abandoned. At night I would sometimes wake and tiptoe into my parents’ room just to check that they hadn’t gone off and left me behind. If I couldn’t hear them breathing I was terrified that they had died. I would put my face as close to theirs as possible until I was sure I could feel their breath.
There was no reason for my fear of being left alone. My mother regarded it as her life’s work to make sure I was always clean and nicely dressed, while my father believed that a good upbringing was the key to success in life. He was rarely at home because he was always working as a waiter in various restaurants. However, whenever he did have time off or was unemployed because he had been sacked for some perceived insolence towards the maître d’, he would open up his very own training academy for me. I would have to open the door between our kitchen and the cramped living room and pretend to show a lady in ahead of me. He would set the table for a fine dinner – perhaps even the Nobel dinner – with countless glasses and knives and forks so that I could learn the etiquette of eating and drinking while at the same time conversing with the elegant ladies sitting on either side of me. Now and again I would be faced with the winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, or the Swedish foreign minister, or the even more distinguished prime minister.
It was a terrifying game. I was pleased when he praised me but constantly worried about doing something wrong in the world into which he led me. There was always an invisible venomous snake lurking among the glasses and cutlery.
My father had actually worked as a waiter at the Nobel dinner on one occasion. His station had been down at the end of the furthest table, which meant he had never been anywhere near the prize-winners or royal guests. But he wanted me to learn how to behave in situations that might arise in life, however unlikely.
I don’t remember him playing with me when I was a child. What I do remember, however, is that he taught me how to do up my own tie and how to knot a cravat before I was ten years old. I also learned how to fold serviettes into a whole array of artistic shapes.
I must have fallen asleep eventually. It’s not unusual for me to seek refuge in sleep when I have suffered some kind of trauma. I can drop off at any time of the day, wherever I happen to be. It’s as if I force myself to sleep, in the same way I used to search for hiding places when I was a child. I set up secret dens among the bins and heaps of coal in the yards behind the apartment blocks where we lived. I would seek out thickets of undergrowth among the trees. Throughout my life I have left a series of undiscovered hiding places behind me. But none of these hiding places has ever been as perfect as sleep.
I woke up shivering. I had left my watch on the bedside table in the house, so that was gone. I went outside and looked at the ruin, which was still smoking. The odd ragged cloud was scudding across the sky; judging by the position of the sun, I guessed it was somewhere between ten and eleven o’clock.
I went down to the boathouse and carefully opened the black-painted door, because the hinges are in poor shape. If I pull too hard, the door comes off completely. There was a pair of dungarees and an old sweater hanging on a hook inside; among the tins of paint I also found a pair of thick socks that my grandmother had knitted for me many years ago. They had been far too big at the time, but now they were a perfect fit. I searched among the spent batteries and rusty tools until I found a woolly hat advertising a television set that had been sold in the 1960s. ALWAYS THE VERY BEST PICTURE it said in barely legible letters.
The mice had been at work – it looked as if it had been peppered with pellets from a shotgun. I pulled it on and went back outside.
I had just closed the door when I spotted a paper bag on the jetty. It contained a mobile phone, some underwear and a packet of sandwiches. Jansson must have come back while I was asleep. He had also left a note on a torn-off piece of a brown envelope.
Phone charged. Keep it. Underpants clean.
Next to the bag stood a wellington boot for the right foot. Mine were green, but this one was black. It was also larger because Jansson has big feet.
There was another note inside the boot.
Sorry, haven’t got green.
I wondered briefly why he hadn’t brought the other half of the black pair, but Jansson operates according to a logic I have never understood.
I took the bag and the boot back to the caravan. Jansson’s flimsy underpants were far too big, but there was something deeply touching about the fact that he had brought them.
I kept my pyjama jacket on as a shirt and pulled on the dungarees and the sweater. I found some paper bags in a drawer, screwed them up and used them to pad out the black wellington boot then sat on the bed and ate a couple of Jansson’s sandwiches; I needed the strength to decide what I was going to do.
A person who has lost everything doesn’t have much time. Or perhaps the reverse is true. I didn’t know.
I heard the sound of an approaching boat. I could tell it wasn’t Jansson; after all the years I have spent living out here, I have learned to identify different types of engine and individual boats.
I listened as the vessel came closer and closer, and identified it as one of the coastguard’s smaller boats, a fast thirty-foot aluminium launch equipped with two Volvo diesel engines.
I put down the sandwiches, put on my holey hat and went outside. The blue-painted boat swung around the headland before I had reached the jetty.
There were three people on board. To my surprise, a young woman was at the helm. She was wearing the coastguard uniform, her blonde hair spilling out from beneath her cap. It was the first time I had seen a woman working on a patrol boat.
She looked alarmingly young, little more than a teenager in fact.
The man standing legs wide apart in the prow, holding the mooring rope, was called Alexandersson. He was about ten years younger than me and the direct opposite of me in physical terms: short and overweight. He was also short-sighted and his hair was thinning.
He was a police officer. A few years ago, after a spate of break-ins at closed-up summer cottages early in the spring, he had called on all the permanent residents to see if we might have noticed anything suspicious. They never found out who was responsible, but Alexandersson and I got on very well. I had no idea whether he knew anything about my past, but after his first visit I thought he could have been the brother I never had.
He owned a little summer cottage on one of the small skerries, which were known as Bräkorna. Whenever he came to see me, we would have a cup of coffee, talk about our health, then discuss the wind and the weather. Neither of us had any reason to get into more serious issues. We would quite happily sit in silence for long periods of time, listening to the birds or the wind soughing in the treetops.
Alexandersson had been married for many years, and his children were grown up. Then all of a sudden his wife left him. I have no idea why; I never asked. I sensed a deep sorrow within him. Perhaps I recognised myself in his grief? Yet another of those questions I am incapable of answering.
Alexandersson landed clumsily on the jetty. He looped the rope around one of the bollards before shaking my hand. A man I had never seen before came out on deck and also jumped ashore. He had seemed unsure of how to behave on a boat that was never completely still. He shook my hand and informed me that his name was Robert Lundin and that he was a fire investigation officer. I couldn’t place his accent right away, but I suspected that he came from somewhere up in Norrland, away from the coast.
The young woman had switched off the engine and made fast the stern mooring rope. She came over and nodded to me. She really was very young.
‘Alma Hamrén,’ she said. ‘I’m very sorry about your house.’
I nodded in return, suddenly on the verge of tears. Alexandersson realised what was happening.
‘Shall we go and take a look?’ he said.
Alma Hamrén stayed with the boat; she was composing a text message, her nimble fingers flying.
No one commented on my odd wellington boots. I couldn’t even tell whether they had noticed; surely they must have done?
Smoke was still rising from various spots in the ruins of my house.
‘Do you have any idea how the fire might have started?’ Alexandersson asked.
I explained that there had been no candles burning, and the stove had gone out by the time I went to bed. I had been asleep for less than two hours when I woke to find the whole house ablaze. I also told him that the wiring had been renewed, and that I couldn’t see any logical explanation as to why the fire had broken out.
Lundin remained in the background, listening. He didn’t ask any questions. I realised it was his job to establish the cause of the fire; I hoped he would succeed. I wanted to know what lay behind this disaster.
Alexandersson and Lundin began to walk around among the debris. I kept my distance, observing their slow progress. Occasionally one of them bent down; they reminded me of watchful animals.
I suddenly felt dizzy and had to lean on the old water pump for support. Alexandersson noticed that I wasn’t feeling well and gave me a searching look. I shook my head and went over to the caravan. I sat down on the steps and made an effort to breathe deeply. After a few minutes I stood up; the dizziness had passed. I set off back to the site of the fire, but stopped as I rounded the corner of the caravan and saw the two men standing among the sooty remains of the roof timbers. They were talking; I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I immediately had the feeling that they were deliberately speaking quietly, as if they didn’t want anyone else to hear.
From time to time Alexandersson glanced in my direction, but I was still hidden by the greenery surrounding the caravan.
I knew, even though I didn’t know. They were discussing the cause of the fire. Saying there were no external factors. Wondering whether I could have started it myself.
I held my breath, trying to make sense of it. Could they really believe that I was capable of such a thing? Or was it just that they had to consider every possibility, no matter how bizarre?
I stayed where I was until they resumed their slow, meticulous examination of the site. From time to time Lundin took photographs.
I pushed aside the low branches and went to rejoin the men.
‘How’s it going?’ I asked.
‘It takes time,’ Alexandersson replied. ‘It’s difficult.’
‘Very difficult,’ Lundin agreed. ‘There’s nothing obvious.’
The young woman called Alma Hamrén was sitting on the bench where I usually examined Jansson when he turned up with his imaginary aches and pains; she was still busy with her phone.
They carried on working for a couple of hours, then said they would probably be back later in the day. I told them I might not be here; I had to go over to the mainland to do some shopping.
I stood on the jetty until the boat had disappeared beyond the headland, then I went back to the remains of the house. They had placed some of the items they had found on a small sheet of plastic.
There were fragments of electrical cables, some half-melted fuses from the fuse box, and at the edge of the sheet I saw something I vaguely recognised. When I bent down to take a closer look, I realised what it was.
It was one of the buckles from the shoes that Giaconelli, the Italian shoemaker, had made for me some years ago.
At that moment I understood that I really had lost everything.
Nothing remained of my seventy-year life.
I stood there gazing at my burned-down house. If I stared at the ruins for long enough, it was as if the building rose again from the sooty ashes.
The site reminded me of a war zone: it could have been the result of exploding grenades, tossed from passing tanks.
I was feeling more and more shaken. The sight of the blackened apple tree filled me with both sorrow and disgust. It was like an attack on the memory of my grandparents. I imagined that it would produce black, putrid apples. No one would be able to eat them. The tree was alive, yet at the same time it was dead.
I moved closer. The ruins were also a burial ground. The whole of my former life had been cremated. During those few violent hours last night the house had been transformed into an oven.
I experienced a vague but growing sense of loss for everything that had gone. I think I was most upset about my logbooks, which is what I called my diaries. The black-covered books hadn’t even crossed my mind as I rushed out of the house, and now they were nothing more than ashes. I could have carried my life in my arms; instead I had fled empty-handed out of the dragon’s mouth.
I thought about Giaconelli’s shoes. The only thing left of them was the charred buckle on Alexandersson’s plastic sheet.
It looked like an insect, perhaps one of the stag beetles I used to see in the summer when I was a child. They had disappeared, although no one seemed to know why. I had once asked Jansson whether there were any among the clumps of oak trees on the islands of the archipelago, and he had asked all the permanent residents when he delivered their post. No one except old widow Sjöberg, who lived in her isolated house on Nässelholmen, had seen a stag beetle since the 1960s. There were plenty around her place, she claimed, but she was notorious for lying about virtually everything, including her own age.
In death Giaconelli’s handmade leather shoes, which he had given me as a present, had been reduced to a charred black stag beetle. I wondered what the buckle was made of. The silver candlestick I had given my grandparents on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary was gone, the silver now simply part of the remains of the fire.
But the buckle had survived. I wouldn’t be able to ask Giaconelli what material he had used; after many years up in the forests of Hälsingland, where he had set up his shoemaking business surrounded by opera music pouring out of an old transistor radio, he had abruptly returned to Italy.
It seemed he had abandoned his workshop in haste. He didn’t have many friends, and none of them had any idea what had happened. He hadn’t even closed the front door. It had been standing open, banging in the wind, when a neighbour came over to see if the shoemaker could fix the loose sole of one of his work boots.
Giaconelli had completed all his orders before simply getting up from his chair and disappearing.
Later I found out from my daughter Louise that he had gone back to Italy by train, to his home village of Santo Ferrera north of Milan, where he had taken to his bed in a simple boarding house in order to die.
I had no idea what had happened to the workshop, or to his tools and all those lasts in the shape of people’s feet. Louise hadn’t told me, so presumably she didn’t know either.
I picked up the buckle. The last time I had spoken to Louise was two weeks ago. She had called late one night from a noisy cafe on the outskirts of Amsterdam, when I had just fallen asleep. She wouldn’t tell me what she was doing there, even though I asked her twice. The conversation was very brief. She was calling to check that I was still alive, and I in turn asked her if she was all right. Perhaps we regard each other as two patients, carrying out our doctors’ rounds together through a series of telephone calls?
The buckle was a charred memory of a pair of handmade shoes, and of a time when there had been stag beetles on the island. I wondered how Louise would react when she found out that the house that would one day have been hers had burned down.
I didn’t know my daughter well enough to gauge her reaction. Louise might simply shrug her shoulders and never mention the matter again, but she might also fly into a rage, blaming me for failing to prevent the fire. She might decide that I was a pyromaniac, even though there was nothing whatsoever to suggest that I had started the blaze.
I put down the buckle, went back to the caravan and finished off Jansson’s sandwiches, then went down to the boathouse, where I had a small open plastic boat with an outboard engine. It’s eighteen horsepower, and if the weather is good and the sea is calm, I can get up to twelve knots. I started the engine, sat down on a mouldy cushion and reversed out of the boathouse. I rounded the headland and increased my speed.
When I looked back I was horrified. I had always been able to see the roof and the upstairs windows of my house above the trees, but now there was only a gaping hole. I was so shaken by the discovery that I almost ran aground on Kogrundet, which lies just beyond the headland, managing to veer away only at the last minute.
I switched off the engine when I reached open water. The sea was empty, not a sound, no boats, hardly even any birds. A lone sea duck was skimming along just above the surface of the water, heading for the outer skerries.
I shivered. It came from deep inside. The boat drifted with the invisible wind. I lay down and stared up at the sky, where the clouds had begun to gather. There would be rain tonight.
The water lapped gently against the thin plastic skin that formed the outer shell of my boat. I tried to decide what to do.
The mobile Jansson had given me rang; it could only be him.
‘Is there something wrong with your engine?’ he asked.
He can see me, I thought, turning my head. But the sea was still empty. There was no sign of Jansson’s boat.
‘Why would there be something wrong with my engine?’
I shouldn’t have snapped at him; Jansson always means well. I sometimes thought that the enormous amount of mail he had read before delivering it over all those years was a kind of declaration of love to the dwindling population of the islands. I think he felt it was part of his duty as a seafaring postman to read every postcard sent or received by the summer visitors. He had to keep himself informed about what these people who turned up for the summer thought about life and death and the permanent residents of the archipelago.
‘Where are you?’ I said.
‘At home.’
He was lying. If he was at home on Stångskär, there was no way he could see me slowly drifting along. That disappointed me. When I came to live on the island I decided never to let other people’s behaviour get me down. The fact that Jansson wasn’t always completely truthful didn’t usually bother me – but when I had just lost my home in a devastating fire?
I suspected he was perched on a rock somewhere, clutching his binoculars.
I told him I had switched off the engine because I needed to think through my situation, and now I was going to head for the mainland to do my shopping.
‘I’m starting her up now,’ I said. ‘If you listen you’ll hear that she’s running perfectly.’
I ended the call before he could say anything else. The engine started and I sped away, heading for land.
My car is old but reliable. It’s parked down by the harbour on the mainland, outside a house that belongs to a strange woman whose name is Rut Oslovski. No one calls her Rut, as far as I know. Everyone says Oslovski. She allows me to park there, and in return I check her blood pressure from time to time. I keep a stethoscope and a blood-pressure monitor in the glove box. Oslovski’s blood pressure is too high, in spite of the fact that she has been taking metoprolol for the past few years. She’s not even forty, so I think it’s important to keep her blood pressure under control.
Oslovski’s left eye is made of glass. No one seems to know how she lost her eye. No one knows very much about Oslovski, to be honest. According to Jansson, she suddenly turned up here twenty years ago after being granted asylum. At the time her Swedish pronunciation was terrible. She later claimed to have come from Poland and become a Swedish citizen, but Jansson, who can be very suspicious, pointed out that no one had ever seen her passport or any proof that she really was a Swedish citizen.
Unexpectedly, Oslovski turned out to be a skilled mechanic. Nor was she afraid of taking on hard physical work in the late autumn or early spring, repairing jetties when the melting ice had damaged the structure, leaving them crooked and unsafe.
She was strong, broad-shouldered, not beautiful but friendly. She kept herself to herself for the most part.
The handymen in the area kept a close eye on her, but no one could say that she took work away from them by charging too little.
When she first arrived, Oslovski lived in a small cottage in the pine forest, a few kilometres from the sea. After a while she bought the little house down by the harbour, which used to belong to a retired pilot.
Jansson had spoken to his colleague who delivered the post in the harbour area; Oslovski never received any letters, nor did she subscribe to any newspapers or magazines. Did she even have a mailbox out on the street?
Sometimes she disappeared for several months and then one day she would be back. As if nothing had happened. She moved around like a cat in the night.
I moored the boat and went up to my car. There was no sign of Oslovski. The car started right away; I dread the day when it gives up and decides it’s time for the scrapyard.
It usually takes me twenty minutes to drive into town, but on this particular day the trip was much faster. I slowed down only when I realised I was putting myself in danger. I was beginning to suspect that the fire had destroyed something inside me. People can have load-bearing beams that give way too.
I parked on the main street, which is in fact the only street in town. It lies right at the end of an inlet poisoned by heavy metals from the industries that were here in the past. I can still recall the stench of a tannery from my childhood.
The bank is a white building right next to the toxic inlet.
I went up to the counter and explained that I had no bank cards and no ID; everything had been lost in the fire. The clerk recognised me but didn’t seem to be quite sure what to do. A person without any form of ID always constitutes some kind of threat nowadays.
‘I know my account number,’ I said, reeling off the numbers as he entered them into his computer.
‘There should be about a hundred thousand kronor in there,’ I said. ‘Give or take a hundred.’
The clerk peered at the screen, as if he couldn’t believe the information that had appeared.
‘Ninety-nine thousand and nine kronor,’ he said.
‘I need to withdraw ten thousand. As you can see, I’m wearing my pyjama jacket instead of a shirt. I’ve lost everything.’
I deliberately raised my voice when I explained what had happened. The whole place fell silent. Behind the counter there were two women in addition to the clerk who was helping me, and three customers were waiting their turn. Everyone was staring at me. I made a ridiculous bow, as if I were acknowledging silent applause.
The clerk counted out my money, then helped me to order a new card.
I went over to a cafe on the other side of the street. I had picked up a free pen and a couple of withdrawal forms in the bank, and I sat down and made a list of what I needed to buy.
It was a very long list. When I had filled both the slips and my serviette, I gave up.
I wondered how I was going to bear the pain and sorrow. I was too old to start again. The future had nothing to say. I could neither hear nor see any way out.
I screwed up the slips and the serviette, finished my tea and left. Then I went to the only clothes shop in town and bought shirts and underwear, sweaters and socks, trousers and a jacket, paying no heed to either quality or price. I put my bags in the car, then headed for the shoe shop to buy wellington boots. The only pair I could find had been made in Italy. That annoyed me. The assistant was a young girl in a headscarf whose Swedish was very poor. I tried to be pleasant, even though I was cross because they didn’t have ordinary Tretorn wellingtons.
‘Don’t you have any Swedish wellingtons? Tretorn?’ I asked.
‘We have these,’ she replied. ‘No others.’
‘It’s ridiculous not to sell classic Swedish wellingtons in a Swedish shoe shop!’
I was still doing my best to be civil, but she must have seen through my tone of voice. I could see that she was scared, which annoyed me even more. I had asked a perfectly simple question that wasn’t supposed to be rude or threatening.
‘Have you any idea what I’m talking about?’ I asked.
‘We have no other boots,’ she said.
‘In that case I’ll leave it. Unfortunately.’
I walked out. I couldn’t help slamming the door behind me.
There were no wellingtons in the ironmonger’s either, just work boots with steel toecaps. I bought a cheap watch, then made my way to a shop down by the harbour to stock up on food. There was an LPG stove in the caravan, plus a few pans. I didn’t buy anything I wanted, but I didn’t buy anything I didn’t want either. I filled my black plastic basket with indifference.
As I was passing the chemist’s I remembered that my medical supplies had been destroyed in the fire, so I went inside. As a doctor I am still entitled to purchase prescription-only drugs.
Before I went back to the car I also bought a pay-as-you-go mobile phone.
I suddenly realised I had no electricity on the island.
I drove back towards the harbour. I still had about half of the money I had taken out. I parked the car in the usual place; the door to Oslovski’s house was shut, and a rotting crow lay on the gravel path. Perhaps Oslovski was off on one of her mysterious trips?
I put my bags in the boat, then went to the chandlery. They had wellington boots, and they were made in Sweden. Or at least they were Tretorn anyway, but they didn’t have my size. I ordered a pair and was informed that it would be at least two weeks before they arrived.
The owner of the shop is called Nordin. He’s always been there. He spoke as if he had mourning crêpe in his voice when we talked about the fire. Nordin has a lot of children. He has been married three or four times. His present wife is called Margareta, but they have no children.
Jansson claims that Nordin does magic tricks for his children, but I have no idea whether that is true or not.
I felt chilled to the bone when I emerged onto the quayside. I went over to the boat, took a shirt out of one of the plastic bags, then went into the cafe above the chandlery. I ordered coffee and a Mazarin. When I picked the pastry up it disintegrated into a pile of dry crumbs.
I sat down at a table with a view over the harbour, unpacked my mobile phone and used the charging point on the cafe wall.
A man who will soon be seventy years old has nowhere to live because his house has burned down. He has no worldly possessions left apart from a boathouse, a caravan, a thirteen-foot open boat and an old car. The question is: what does he do now? Does this man have a future? Does he have any real reason to go on living?
I stopped dead right there. My daughter Louise – why hadn’t I thought of her first of all? I was ashamed of myself.
Whether it was my crumbling Mazarin or what I had just been thinking I couldn’t say, but the tears began to flow. I wiped my eyes with my napkin. The scene was the very epitome of loneliness and isolation. An old man sitting in a deserted cafe on an autumn day, the only customer in a harbour establishment to which the yachts and cruisers will not return until next summer.
I realised I had to call Louise. I would have preferred to wait, but she would never forgive me if I didn’t tell her what had happened right away. My daughter is a volatile individual who lacks the tolerance and patience I believe I possess. She reminds me of her mother Harriet, who made her way across the ice using her wheeled walker some years ago, then died in my house the following summer.
My train of thought was interrupted as the door of the cafe opened and an unfamiliar woman of about forty came in. She was wearing exactly the kind of green wellingtons I had been searching for, plus a warm jacket and a scarf wound around her neck and head. When she took it off I saw that she had short hair and was very attractive. She went over to the counter and contemplated the unfortunate Mazarins.
Suddenly she turned and smiled at me. I nodded, wondering if I had met her before and forgotten. Veronika, who ran the cafe, emerged from the kitchen, and the woman ordered coffee and a Danish pastry. She came over to my table. I didn’t know who she was.
‘May I join you?’
She pulled out the chair without waiting for a response. A ray of pale autumn sunshine lit up her face as she sat down. She reached for the yellow curtain and pulled it across, shutting out the sun.
She smiled again. She had nice teeth. I smiled back but was careful to show only a little of my upper teeth; they still look reasonably good. My daughter Louise inherited her mother’s genes as far as her teeth are concerned, and unfortunately they are not as good as mine. Sometimes when Louise has been visiting and has got really drunk, she has quite unexpectedly attacked me because her teeth are not as white as mine.
‘My name is Lisa Modin,’ the woman said. ‘And you must be the man who watched his house burn down last night. My sympathies, of course. It must have been a terrible experience. After all, a house and a home is like an outer skin for a human being.’
She spoke with a slight accent that could have been from Sörmland, but I wasn’t sure. And I was even less sure about why she had come to sit at my table. She took off her warm jacket and hung it over the back of the chair next to her.
I still didn’t know what she wanted, but it didn’t matter. In a moment of madness the very fact that she had sat down at my table made me start to love her.
An old man doesn’t have much time at his disposal, I thought. This sudden love is all we can hope for.
‘I’m a journalist. I write for the local paper. The editor asked me to go over and talk to you, take a look at the site of the fire. But when I went into the chandlery to ask how I could get to your island, they said you were probably in the grocery shop. Which you weren’t – but you were here.’
‘How did you know it was me?’
‘The man in the chandlery described you as best he could. It wasn’t difficult to work out, particularly as there was no one in the grocery shop, and there’s no one else in here.’
She took a notepad out of her bag. The music from the radio in the kitchen suddenly seemed to irritate her; she got up, went over to the counter and asked Veronika to turn it down. After a moment the radio fell silent.
Lisa Modin was smiling as she came back to the table.
‘I’ll take you over,’ I said. ‘If you can cope with a small open boat.’
‘And you’ll bring me back?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you still living on the island? I mean, your house burned down.’
‘I have a caravan.’
‘On an island? I thought it was really small. Is there a road?’
‘It’s a long story.’
She was holding a pen but hadn’t yet opened her notepad.
‘The news about the fire is one thing,’ she said. ‘My editor is dealing with that; he’ll speak to the police and the fire service. He wants me to write a more in-depth article about what losing your home like that means to a family.’
‘I’m on my own.’
‘Don’t you even have pets?’
‘They’re dead.’
‘Did they burn to death?’
She seemed horrified at the thought.
‘Dead and buried.’
‘And you don’t have a wife?’
‘She’s dead too. Cremated. But I do have a daughter.’
‘What does she have to say about all this?’
‘Nothing so far. She doesn’t know yet.’
She gave me a searching look, then she put down her pen and drank her coffee. I noticed that she was wearing a ring with an amber stone on her right hand. No ring on her left hand.
‘It’s too late today,’ she said. ‘But how about tomorrow? If you have time?’
‘I’ve got all the time in the world.’
‘Surely not, if everything you owned has gone up in smoke?’
I didn’t reply because of course she was right.