Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

Sullivan had followed her down to the cell.

‘Maybe you should fetch that Indian doctor,’ he said.

Ana had the distinct impression that Sullivan knew Pandre was not at all what he had pretended to be, but just now was not the time to start wondering about what Sullivan knew or didn’t know. He could think whatever he liked.

‘He’s already left,’ she said. ‘Why can’t the fort summon a doctor?’

‘He’s on his way,’ said Sullivan. ‘But he had to deliver a baby first. Life always takes precedence over death.’

‘Not always,’ said Ana. ‘I think that life and death are equally important. Isabel might die if she doesn’t get medical treatment.’

The doctor who eventually arrived turned out to be an extremely deaf old Portuguese man who had lived in Africa for over fifty years. He surprised Ana by stitching up the gaping wound with admirable skill, and covering it with cotton wool.

‘Will she survive?’ Ana asked.

‘Of course she’ll survive,’ said the doctor. ‘She’ll have a scar. But that’s all.’

‘Did whoever attacked her want to kill her, or just to injure her?’

She had to shout loudly into the doctor’s ear in order for him to understand.

‘Both intentions are possible,’ he said, ‘but the probability is that he wasn’t trying to kill her. To do that all he’d have needed to do was to slash her a bit lower down, over her throat, and a bit deeper. A sharp knife across a victim’s throat can kill in less than a minute.’

Ana stayed with Isabel. She couldn’t be sure how much pain the patient was in. They shared the silence and listened to each other’s breathing. Ana watched an insect creeping incredibly slowly over one of the cell walls.

‘Who could have got access to her?’ Ana asked.

‘To be absolutely honest,’ said Sullivan, ‘I just don’t know. But I can promise you that we shall get to the bottom of this. I don’t want a prisoner for whom I’m responsible to be killed.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes,’ said Sullivan. ‘It certainly is true. I don’t care about her — I think she ought to be hanged or shot. But nobody is going to sneak into one of my cells and kill her, and get away with it.’

That evening, when Ana returned to her house and was about to draw the curtains in her bedroom, she once again saw the black man in overalls standing in the street below.

Not long afterwards, she peered out through a gap in the curtains.

The man was still there.

He’s waiting for me, she thought. There’s something he wants from me.

She went down the stairs, carefully opened the front door and passed by the guards. She was possessed by an overwhelming desire to push them into the fire for falling asleep instead of standing guard over the entrance to her house, but instead she opened the gate leading into the street. The man was still there, on the other side. She was carrying a candle, and walked over to him.

‘I’m Moses,’ he said. ‘Isabel’s brother. I’ve come from the mines to set her free and take her away with me.’

His eyes were completely calm. In some strange way he reminded her of her father.

Two fires were already burning where the guards were curled up asleep. But Moses lit a third one at the back of the house where Ana had arranged for a vegetable garden to be created, and planted some orange and lime trees. For the first time since she arrived in Lourenço Marques she found herself with an African who treated her as an equal. There was no trace in him of the false subservience the blacks felt obliged to assume. Moses looked her in the eye when he spoke to her. And this was the first time a black man had sat down on a chair in her presence. The norm was always for her to sit down while the black man she was speaking to remained standing. Ana Dolores had made that clear to her from the very start.

She put it to him straight out: why was he so different from all the others?

‘Why shouldn’t I look you in the eye?’ Moses replied. ‘You can’t hate or despise blacks or you wouldn’t be trying to help my sister. And so you are an unusual person as far as I am concerned.’

‘What do you do down the mines? Do you dig for coal?’

‘Diamonds. But of course, there is also coal there. It’s the same stuff, after all.’

Ana didn’t know about the connection between diamonds and coal, and so she didn’t understand his comment.

‘You make fires with coal. You wear diamonds on your fingers. How can they be the same thing?’

‘Really old coal develops into diamonds,’ said Moses. ‘One day perhaps I can explain it to you properly — all about the stuff we take out of the ground in the Rand.’

Ana said that she knew who he was and where he worked — but wondered how he knew who she was. Has Isabel told him about her?

‘I know what I know,’ was all he said in response. He gave her no further explanation, but instead embarked on a description of life in the mines, without her having asked about it.

‘The whites who’ve landed on our coasts have always turned most of their attention to looking for what is hidden under the soil,’ said Moses. ‘That’s why we Africans find it so hard to understand you. How can anybody travel so far and be prepared to risk dying of fever or snake bites, simply in order to look for things that are hidden under the ground? Of course, a lot of hunters come here as well. Others are running away from harassment they suffer in their homelands — what we don’t understand is why they come here and choose to live a life harassing us. White people are basically incomprehensible — but for that reason we find it easy to understand them because we know what they are after. But they don’t even do the digging themselves: they force us to do it. The whites have transformed us blacks into servants in the underworld. One day it will all come to an end, just as the sources of gold and diamonds will wither away.’

‘What will you do when your sister is free again?’ Ana asked.

‘I’m thinking of using those underground tunnels I know so well to protect my sister and her children. That’s where I shall take them to once she has escaped. Moving into another country, passing over a border that the whites have established, that doesn’t mean a thing. All the borders you have made are nothing more than lines in our red soil — they could have been drawn by children using sticks.’

He stopped, and watched the fire dying out. It seemed to Ana that he had made a fire that would only burn for as long as he had something to say to her. Once the embers were no longer glowing, he stood up and left. His last words were that they would meet at the fort the following day.

Ana went back to her bedroom. Carlos woke up when she lay down in bed, and stretched his hand out towards her. But just now she didn’t want an ape in bed beside her. Not just after having met and talked to the man known as Moses. She smacked Carlos — not hard, but enough to signal to him that he should move to the ceiling light. With a sigh and an irritated grunt, Carlos leapt up and lay down in the dish-shaped lampshade, one arm hanging down towards the bed.

She got up early next morning, sat for a long time in front of the mirror contemplating her face and thinking how she could barely contain herself until she met Moses again. To her surprise she found herself thinking an unheard-of thought: Moses was a man she could imagine herself becoming close to. She put her hand over her mouth, as if she had cried out in horror.

The person I can see in the mirror is somebody else, she thought. Or somebody I have become without realizing it.

A few hours later, when she had forced herself to go through Herr Eber’s accounts in order to try and understand the claims about reduced income, Julietta announced that Father Leopoldo had come to visit her. Ana was immediately worried that something might have happened to Isabel. She ran down the stairs to meet him. But Father Leopoldo was able to calm her down. The old doctor had stitched up the wound very well, and the cotton wool was protecting her skin and preventing dirt from entering it.