Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

Hanna and Captain Svartman drank tea under the jacaranda tree.

‘I wonder who is most surprised,’ she said. ‘You at seeing me, or me at seeing you?’

‘I obviously wondered what happened,’ said Svartman. ‘We spent a whole day looking for you. But then we were forced to continue our voyage.’

‘I had the constant feeling that Lundmark was still there on board the ship,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t cope with that. There was no other way out for me.’

Svartman nodded thoughtfully. Then he started to smile.

‘I’m very pleased, of course. Very glad to see that you are still alive.’

‘A friend of mine was married to the owner of this brothel,’ she said. ‘He died. She is very ill. I look after the money that’s made here — but I hate the whole business, of course, and only do it for the sake of my friend.’

Did he believe her? She couldn’t be sure. The ring she had on her left hand could be a leftover from her marriage to Lundmark.

‘What exactly happened?’ Captain Svartman asked when he had thought about what she said. It still seemed as if he couldn’t really grasp the fact that he had met again the third mate’s widow, who had jumped ship.

‘I booked into a hotel to start with. I had enough money to do that. Then I ended up looking after a house for an elderly man. But all the time I’ve been looking forward to the moment when I can go back home.’

‘What prevents you from doing that?’

‘My sorrow at having lost Lundmark. And my fear of the sea.’

‘I think I can understand,’ said Svartman doubtfully.

As nothing she had said was true, Hanna tried to change the subject. She returned to the moment when she had left the ship under cover of night.

‘What did you think had happened?’ she asked.

‘I thought you might have drowned.’

‘Drowned by accident, or drowned myself?’

‘I suppose I considered both possibilities. But needless to say there were others on board who made wilder guesses. That you had fallen into the hands of white slave traders, for instance. Or been killed by a bite from a poisonous snake that had managed to slither on board, and that you had fallen overboard as the poison began to work.’

‘But nobody suspected that I had left the ship of my own free will?’

Svartman sounded depressed when he replied.

‘I have to admit that not even I could envisage that possibility. And after all, during my many years as captain I’ve seen lots of sailors disappear in ports all over the world.’

She asked about the voyage, and the return route: had they called at Lourenço Marques on the way home as well? Svartman told her they had gone straight to Port Elizabeth to pick up some mixed cargo bound for the French port of Rouen.

She started asking about Halvorsen and the other sailors. And about Forsman and Berta. He answered briefly and suddenly seemed to be in a hurry. Hanna gathered that he didn’t want to stay at the brothel any longer than necessary. His visit to Felicia had been a secret, and nobody in the crew must get to know about it.

Hanna was disappointed to discover that Captain Svartman was just like all other men. They concealed the truth about themselves, the things they did in secret, under cover of darkness.

But was she any better herself? Didn’t she also go sneaking around? They were simply sitting there under the jacaranda tree exchanging half-truths.

‘How long are you staying here?’ she asked.

‘Until tomorrow.’

‘I’d like to visit the ship. And naturally, I won’t mention the fact that I met you here.’

She thought she could detect a doubtful look in his eye as he tried to decide whether or not to believe her. But she looked him straight in the eye. She was his equal now, no longer the scared cook who had curtseyed deeply to him almost a year ago.

She stood up and brought the conversation to a close. She was setting him free.

They said goodbye outside in the street.

‘This afternoon will be okay,’ said Svartman. ‘I have business to see to this morning, and I must keep an eye on the bunkering.’

The peacock was nowhere to be seen. The street was completely deserted in the blazing sunshine. She stretched out her hand.

‘I’ll come this afternoon, then,’ she said. ‘If that’s all right with you.’

‘I’ll be there.’

He bowed, then seemed to hesitate.

‘Peltonen is dead,’ he said. ‘He fell overboard one night off the Egyptian coast. Nobody noticed he was missing until the next morning.’

‘It was Peltonen who measured the depth of Lundmark’s grave,’ said Hanna. ‘1,935 metres.’

Svartman nodded. Then turned and walked away. He turned off into the first side street.

So he’s not taking the shortest route to the harbour, she thought. He turned off as soon as possible so that I wouldn’t be able to see him.

She suddenly wondered if they had seen any icebergs.

Then she was driven back home to her house on the hill, and sat down to write the letters that couldn’t wait.

It was a shock to her when she read through the letter she had written to Elin. Instead of writing about the voyage, she had written something more like a saga. The only link with reality was her description of how she had met Lundmark, married him, and then been forced to watch as he was buried at sea. But she had left out completely most of what had happened afterwards — her jumping ship and meeting the brothel owner Senhor Vaz. She merely wrote that she was in Africa, in good health, and on her way home. As an explanation of why she hadn’t completed the voyage to Australia and hadn’t come back to Sweden on the Lovisa , she wrote rather vaguely that she had been afflicted with a serious but short-lived illness, and had been perfectly healthy again for ages.

She put the letter down in disgust. It was only now that she realized the full consequences of what Captain Svartman had said. What Forsman had been told when the ship docked in Sundsvall after returning from Australia. And what Elin must eventually have been told in her house in the remote mountains.

Her daughter was dead. For a long time Elin had been forced to live with the sad news that Hanna had died in a foreign country. Nobody knew what had happened to her, or where her grave was. Always assuming that there was a grave.

The thought made Hanna cry. She suddenly realized that Julietta was standing in the half-open doorway, watching her. In a flash of rage Hanna grabbed Senhor Vaz’s old bronze paperweight and hurled it at her. Julietta dodged it, and hastily closed the door.

Hanna wanted to cry in peace. But it seemed that there was no time even for that. She tore the letter up and wrote a new one, her hand shaking.

‘I’m alive,’ she wrote. That was the most important thing. ‘I’m alive.’ She repeated those words on almost every other line. The whole letter was a sort of long request to be taken at her word. She was alive, she wasn’t dead as Captain Svartman had thought. She had gone ashore because she was devastated by grief, and then stayed there when the ship continued its voyage to Australia. But she would soon be coming home. And she was alive. That was the most important thing of all: she was still alive.

That was the letter she wanted to write to Elin. And she repeated the same words, albeit in less emotional style, in the other two letters she wrote that day. One was to Forsman, the other to Berta. She was alive, and she would soon be coming home again.

Eventually the three letters lay on the desk in front of her, meticulously fitted into envelopes that she carefully sealed with the names of the recipients written as neatly as she could possibly manage. She and Berta had taught themselves to read and write — with difficulty, but even so it was an important step away from poverty: she still found it difficult to write, and was unsure about spelling and word order. But she didn’t bother about that. The letter to Elin would be the most important message she had ever received in her life. One of her daughters had returned from the dead.