Хеннинг Манкелль - After the Fire

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.’