Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

Once a month, in accordance with the cashier’s instructions, she would prepare the payments that needed to be made. On that day Eber was always accompanied by several Portuguese soldiers who escorted him back to the brothel with the bulging briefcase.

Nobody stayed in the hotel as a paying guest now. Once Hanna had moved out the rooms had either remained empty, or been used by the whores when their own rooms were being repaired after being trashed by some overexuberant client. She even wondered if there had ever been any normal paying guests before her, or whether the hotel business was no more than a front to give the brothel an appearance of decency.

One day when she was putting more money into the safe, she noticed a little notebook lying on the bottom shelf, covered in dust that had somehow, mysteriously, managed to filter in despite the tightly fitting steel door. When she examined it more closely while sitting at the desk, she discovered that it was empty. There wasn’t a single word written in it. It was a gift from a Japanese shipping line with Yokohama as its main port. Japanese sailors sometimes visited the brothel. They were clean and polite, but not especially liked by the women because the intensity of their sexual activity could be painfully tiring. Hanna had heard rumours of a Japanese mate who had paid for a whole night, and was alleged to have had nineteen sexual encounters. Whether or not that was true, the Japanese were certainly persistent, and on some occasion or other Senhor Vaz must have received the empty notebook as a present, or perhaps as a souvenir — or possibly even as an apology for an excessively savage erotic outburst.

The leather smelled of calfskin, but it had turned black over the years. The white pages were made of thick paper, but were nevertheless soft and pliable. When Hanna wrote her name on one, she could see how the paper sucked up the dark blue ink. No blotting paper was needed.

She wrote the current date: 26 March, 1905. Carefully, as if every single word could have dangerous consequences, she wrote a sentence: ‘Dreamt last night about what no longer is.’

‘Dreamt last night about what no longer is.’ That was all. But it seemed to her that she had sparked off a new habit that she was determined to stick to. She would no longer simply write down new figures in her account books, but she would also keep a diary that nobody but she would have access to.

From then on she would write down a few sentences after Eber had been with his bag full of money and she had locked away the previous night’s income in the safe. As the days passed she dared to stray from the usual paths where the words she wrote simply referred to something she had dreamt, or what Carlos had done, or what the weather had been like. She started to write about the women who worked for her, both in the brothel and in the house where she was sitting and writing.

After just over a month she made a note about Senhor Vaz and his hopeless attempts to satisfy both her and himself. Her tone became increasingly sharp, the judgements she passed on people increasingly less considerate. No unauthorized readers were going to have access to her diary.

But what she wrote in her diary had no effect on the daily conversations she had with the people she was in charge of. In those situations she was just as friendly and considerate as she had been before. But in her diary she wrote what she really thought. That was where the truth was; but she kept it hidden.

Only one other person knew of the existence of the diary. That was young Julietta, who helped out in the house whenever and wherever necessary. One day she had stood in the half-open doorway and seen Hanna leaning over her diary at her desk. Hanna had called the girl in and shown her what she was writing, well aware that Julietta was illiterate and had no idea about writing nor languages. Julietta had asked what Hanna was writing.

‘Words,’ Hanna had said. ‘Words about the country I come from.’

That was all she had said, despite the fact that Julietta continued to ask questions. Afterwards Hanna had asked herself why she had lied to Julietta. There was nothing in the diary about her life in the mountains and by the cold river. But on the other hand she had often made disparaging comments about Julietta.

Why hadn’t she told her the truth? Had she begun to be like all the others in this town, who never seemed to tell the truth? At first she had believed that Senhor Vaz had been right when he claimed that all black people told lies. But then she had discovered that the same applied to all the whites, and to those of Indian or Arabic origins. Everybody lied, even if they did so in different ways. She was living in a country which seemed to be founded on lies and hypocrisy.

She signalled that Julietta should leave the room. Then she wrote down what she had just been thinking: ‘Black people lie in order to avoid unnecessary suffering. White people lie to preserve the superiority they wish to uphold. And the others, the Arabs and Indians, lie because there is no longer room for the truth in this town we live in.’

She also thought, although she didn’t write it down, that she regretted having shown Julietta her notebook. Perhaps that was a careless move that would come back to haunt her at some time in the future.

She locked the diary away in the safe and stood by the window looking out over the sea. She took her binoculars and viewed the island called Inhaca which she had once visited, during her ‘time of inactivity’, with Senhor Vas and the solicitor, Senhor Andrade.

She redirected the binoculars at the town, at the harbour district where the brothel was located. If she stood on tiptoe she could see the lookout outside the gate, and possibly also one or two of the girls hanging around in the shadows, waiting for a client.

A thought occurred to her that she had had many times before: I can see them. But the question is, can they see me? And if they can: what do I mean to them?

She replaced the binoculars and stand on the marble shelf in front of the window, and closed her eyes. Despite the heat she could conjure up how she had sat in the sleigh, wrapped up in Jonathan Forsman’s furs that smelled of lard and dogs.

When she opened her eyes again, she thought that she really must soon make up her mind. Should she stay where she was, or should she return home?

But on that day of all days, the day when she had shown Julietta her notebook, Hanna was possessed by another emotion.

She was frightened. She had the feeling that danger was approaching. There was something in the vicinity that she hadn’t yet discovered.

A growing threat. That she couldn’t see. But she knew that it was approaching rapidly, like a sleigh gliding along at speed over tightly packed snow.

Not long after she had begun to write about Senhor Vaz in her diary, Hanna called a meeting of the women and everybody else who worked in the brothel. She held it early in the morning when the brothel was nearly always empty. Most of them generally slept when the last of the clients had left. Many of them travelled in horse-drawn carriages, but some in motor cars, all of which were cleaned and polished during the night by the black workers who disobeyed the law that said blacks were not allowed in the town at night. The police turned a blind eye because they always had right of access to the women in the various brothels concentrated along rua Bagamoio provided they left the nocturnal workers in peace.

It seemed to Hanna that the newly polished cars heading for the South African border in the early hours of the morning were a sign that the men who used the services of her brothel wanted to remove all trace of what they had been up to. It was as if the cars and carriages were also soiled by what went on inside the brothel. But now the men were travelling back in their sparklingly clean vehicles to the country where it was morally reprehensible and perilously close to being a jailable offence for white men to associate with black women.