Хеннинг Манкелль - Before the Frost

“That’s not enough?”

Henrietta touched the keys as if sketching out a few more bars of music.

“Anna is always catching glimpses of her father. She’s told me stories like this since she was a little girl.”

Linda raised her eyebrows. Anna had never mentioned one of these sightings before, and Linda was sure she would have. When they were younger they told each other everything. Anna was one of the few people who Linda had told about standing on the edge of the overpass in Malmö. What Henrietta said didn’t fit this picture.

“Anna is never going to relinquish her hope,” Henrietta continued. “The hope that Erik will one day come back. Even that he is still alive.”

“Why did he leave?”

“He left because he was disappointed.”

“By what?”

“By life. He had such marvelous ambitions when he was younger. He seduced me with those dreams, if you must know. I had never met a man who had the kind of wonderful visions that Erik had. He was going to make a difference in the world, in our generation. He knew without a doubt that he had been put on this earth in order to do something on a grand scale. We met when he was sixteen and I was fifteen. Even as young as I was, I knew I had never met anyone like him; he radiated dreams and life force. At that time he was still looking for his niche — was it art, sports, politics, or another arena in which he was going to leave his mark? He had decided to give himself until the age of twenty to figure it out. I can’t remember any self-doubt in him until then. But when he turned twenty he started to worry. There was a restlessness in him. Until then he had had all the time in the world. When I started making demands on him to help support the family after Anna was born, he would get impatient and scream at me. He had never done that before. That was when he started making his sandals; he was good with his hands. He called them ‘sandals of indolence’ as a kind of protest, I think, for the fact that they were taking up his valuable time. It was probably then that he started planning his disappearance or, should I say, escape. He wasn’t running away from me or Anna, he was running away from himself, from his disappointment in life. I wonder if he managed it — I’ve never been able to ask him, of course. One day he was just gone. It took me by surprise. It was only in hindsight that I realized how carefully he must have planned it. I can forgive him the fact that he sold my car. What I’ll never understand or accept is that he left Anna. They were so close. I know he loved her. I was never as important to him, or at least not after the first couple of years while I was still a part of his dreams. How could he leave her — how can a person’s disappointment in life, stemming as it did from an unattainable dream, conceivably weigh more heavily than the most important person in his life? I think that must be a contributing factor to his death, at least to the fact that he never returned.”

“I didn’t think anyone knew what happened to him.”

“He must be dead. He’s been missing for twenty-four years. Where could he possibly be?”

“Anna’s convinced she saw him.”

“She sees him on every street corner. I’ve tried to talk her out of it and make her face the truth. No one knows what happened. But he has to be dead by now.”

Henrietta paused. The greyhound sighed.

“What do you think happened?” Linda asked.

“I think he gave up — when he realized the dream was nothing more than that. And that the Anna he left behind was real. At that point it was too late. He would always have been plagued by his conscience.”

Henrietta closed the lid over the piano keys with a thud and stood up.

“More coffee?”

“No, thanks. I have to get going.”

Henrietta seemed anxious and Linda watched her closely. She grabbed Linda’s arm and started to hum a melody that Linda recognized. Her voice alternated between high, shrill tones and softer, cleaner ones.

“Do you know that song?” she asked when she was finished.

“I recognize it, but I don’t know what it is.”

“ Buona Sera .”

“Is it Spanish?”

“Italian. It means ‘good night.’ It was popular in the fifties. So many people today borrow or steal or vandalize old music. They make pop songs out of Bach. I do the reverse. I take songs like Buona Sera and turn them into classical music.”

“How do you do that?”

“I break down the structure, change the rhythm, replace the guitar sound with a massive flood of violins. I turn a banal song about three minutes long into a symphony. When it’s ready I’ll play it for you. Then people will finally understand what I’ve been trying to do all these years.”

Henrietta followed her out.

“Come back sometime.”

Linda promised to do so, and then drove away. She saw storm clouds heaped up in the distance, out over the sea in the direction of Bornholm. Linda pulled over after a while and got out of the car. She had a sudden desire to smoke. She had quit smoking three years earlier but the desire still hit her from time to time, even if it was getting more rare.

There are some things mothers don’t know about their daughters, she thought. Henrietta doesn’t know that Anna and I told each other everything during those years. If she had, she would never have told me about Anna always seeing her father on the street. There are a lot of things I’m not sure of, but I know Anna would have told me that.

There was only one possible explanation. Henrietta had not been telling her the truth about Anna and her missing father.

She pulled back the curtains a little after five o’clock in the morning and looked at the thermometer. It was nine degrees Celsius, the sky clear with little or no wind. What a wonderful day for an expedition, she thought. She had prepared everything the night before and it didn’t take her long to leave her apartment across from the old railway station in Skurup. Her forty-year-old Vespa was waiting for her in the yard under a custom-made cover. She was the original owner and, since she had taken such good care of it, it was still in mint condition. In fact, word of it had spread to the factory in Italy and she had received several solicitations over the years asking her if she would consider letting the company put it in their museum. In return, the company would supply her with a new Vespa every year.

Year after year she had declined the offer, intending to keep this Vespa that she had bought when she was twenty-two years old as long as she lived. She didn’t care what happened to it after that. One of her four grandchildren might want it, but she wasn’t about to write a will for the sake of an ancient Vespa.

She adjusted her backpack, strapped on her helmet, and kick-started the old machine. It instantly roared into life. Half an hour later she arrived at the small parking lot by Led Lake. She walked the Vespa in behind some bushes beside a large oak tree. A car drove past on the main road, then silence returned.

As she prepared to walk into the forest and become invisible to the outside world, she wondered if this wasn’t the most satisfying way of expressing one’s independence: by daring to abandon the well-trodden path. To step into the underbrush and vanish from the eyes of the world.

Her brother Håkan had taught her that there were two kinds of people in the world: the ones who always chose the shortest distance between two points, and the ones who looked for the scenic route where the curves, slopes, and vistas were to be found. They had played in the forests around Älmhult when they were growing up. After her father was severely injured by a fall from a telephone pole while repairing a phone line, they moved to Skåne. Her mother got a job at the Ystad Hospital. That was where she spent her adolescence and forgot all about exploring, until the day she stood outside the gates to Lund University and realized she had no idea what to do with her life. She turned to her childhood memories for inspiration.