Henning Mankell: Faceless Killers

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He has forgotten something, he knows that for sure when he wakes up. Something he dreamed during the night. Something he ought to remember.

He tries to remember. But sleep is like a black hole. A well that reveals nothing of its contents.

At least I didn’t dream about the bulls, he thinks. Then I would have been all sweaty, as if I had suffered through a fever during the night. This time the bulls left me in peace.

He lies still in the darkness and listens. His wife’s breathing at his side is so faint that he can hardly hear it.

One of these mornings she’ll be lying dead beside me and I won’t even notice, he thinks. Or maybe it’ll be me. One of us will die before the other. Daybreak will reveal that one of us has been left all alone.

He looks at the clock on the table next to the bed. The hands glow and point at quarter to five.

Why did I wake up? he thinks. I usually sleep till five thirty. I’ve done that for over forty years. Why am I waking up now?

He listens to the darkness and suddenly he is wide awake.

Something is different. Something is no longer the way it usually is.

Carefully he gropes with one hand until he touches his wife’s face. With his fingertips he can feel that she’s warm. So she’s not the one who died. Neither of them has been left alone yet.

He listens to the darkness.

The horse, he thinks. She’s not neighing. That’s why I woke up. The mare usually whinnies at night. I hear it without waking up, and in my subconscious I know that I can keep on sleeping.

Carefully he gets out of the creaky bed. For forty years they’ve owned it. It was the only piece of furniture they bought when they got married. It’s also the only bed they’ll ever have in their lives.

He can feel his left knee aching as he walks across the wooden floor to the window.

I’m old, he thinks. Old and used up. Every morning when I wake up I’m surprised all over again that I’m seventy years old.

He looks out into the winter night. It’s the eighth of January, 1990, and no snow has fallen in Skåne this winter. The lamp outside the kitchen door casts its glow across the yard, the bare chestnut tree, and the fields beyond. He squints his eyes toward the neighboring farm where the Lövgrens live. The long, low white house is dark. The stable in the corner against the farmhouse has a pale yellow lamp above the black stable door. That’s where the mare stands in her stall, and that’s where she suddenly whinnies uneasily at night.

He listens to the darkness.

The bed creaks behind him.

“What are you doing?” mutters his wife.

“Go back to sleep,” he replies. “I’m just stretching my legs.”

“Is your knee hurting again?”

“No.”

“Then come back to bed. Don’t stand there freezing, you’ll catch cold.”

He hears her turn over onto her side.

Once we loved each other, he thinks. But he shields himself from his own thought. That’s too noble a word. Love. It’s not for the likes of us. Someone who has been a farmer for over forty years, who has stood bowed over the heavy Scanian clay, and does not use the word “love” when he talks about his wife. In our lives, love has always been something totally different.

He looks at the neighbor’s house, squinting, trying to penetrate the darkness of the winter night.

Whinny, he thinks. Whinny in your stall so I know that everything’s normal. So I can lie down under the quilt for a little while longer. A retired crippled farmer’s day is long and dreary enough as it is.

Suddenly he realizes that he’s looking at the kitchen window of the neighbor’s house. Something is different. All these years he has cast an occasional glance at his neighbor’s window. Now something suddenly looks different. Or is it just the darkness that’s confusing him? He blinks and counts to twenty to rest his eyes. Then he looks at the window again, and now he’s sure that it’s open. A window that has always been closed at night is suddenly open. And the mare hasn’t whinnied at all.

The mare hasn’t whinnied because Lövgren hasn’t taken his usual nightly walk to the stable when his prostate acts up and drives him out of his warm bed.

I’m just imagining things, he says to himself. My eyes are cloudy. Everything is the same as usual. After all, what could happen here? In the little town of Lenarp, just north of Kade Lake, on the way to beautiful Krageholm Lake, right in the heart of Skåne? Nothing ever happens here. Time stands still in this little town where life flows along like a creek with no vigor or intent. The only people who live here are a few old farmers who have sold or leased out their land to someone else. We live here and wait for the inevitable.

He looks at the kitchen window again, and he thinks that neither Maria nor Johannes Lövgren would forget to close it. With age a sense of dread comes sneaking in; there are more and more locks, and no one forgets to close a window before nightfall. To grow old is to live in fear. The dread of something menacing that you felt when you were a child returns when you get old.

I could get dressed and go out, he thinks. Hobble through the yard with the winter wind on my face, up to the fence that divides our property. I could see with my own eyes that I’m just imagining things.

But he decides to stay put. Soon Johannes will be getting out of bed to make coffee. First he’ll turn on the light in the bathroom, then the light in the kitchen. Everything will be the way it always is.

He stands by the window and realizes that he’s freezing. The cold of old age that comes creeping in, even in the warmest room. He thinks about Maria and Johannes. We’ve had a marriage with them too, he thinks, as neighbors and as farmers. We’ve helped each other, shared the hardships and the bad years. But we’ve shared the good times too. Together we’ve celebrated Midsummer and eaten Christmas dinner. Our children ran back and forth between the two farms as if they belonged to both. And now we’re sharing the long-drawn-out years of old age.

Without knowing why, he opens the window, carefully so as not to wake Hanna. He holds on tight to the latch so that the gusty winter wind won’t tear it out of his hand. But the night is completely calm, and he recalls that the weather report on the radio had said nothing about any storm approaching over the Scanian plain.

The starry sky is clear, and it is very cold. He is just about to close the window again when he thinks he hears a sound. He listens and turns, with his left ear toward the open window. His good ear, not his bad right ear that was injured by all the time he spent cooped up in stuffy, rumbling tractors.

A bird, he thinks. A night bird calling.

Suddenly he is afraid. Out of nowhere the fear appears and seizes him.

It sounds like somebody shouting. In despair, trying to make someone else hear.

A voice that knows it has to penetrate through thick stone walls to catch the attention of the neighbors.

I’m imagining things, he thinks again. There’s nobody shouting. Who would it be?

He closes the window so hard that it makes a flowerpot jump, and Hanna wakes up.

“What are you doing?” she says, and he can hear that she’s annoyed.

As he replies, he suddenly feels sure.

The terror is real.

“The mare isn’t whinnying,” he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “And the Lövgrens’ kitchen window is wide open. And someone is shouting.”

She sits up in bed.

“What did you say?”

He doesn’t want to answer, but now he’s sure that it wasn’t a bird he heard.