Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

Julietta hurried out of the room. Ana could hear her footsteps racing down the stairs.

Julietta arrived back less than an hour later, panting after all that running up the steep hills. Ana was forced to tell her to sit down and get her breath back, as to begin with she couldn’t understand what Julietta was trying to say.

‘The body has gone already,’ said Julietta in the end.

Ana stared at her.

‘What do you mean by “the body has gone”?’

‘He fetched it as the sun rose.’

‘Who fetched it?’

‘A black man. He carried her away without any assistance.’

‘Did you not see the young commanding officer?’

‘One of the soldiers said he was still in bed in his lodgings, asleep. He’d been invited out yesterday evening.’

‘Invited by whom? Had he been drinking? Do I have to drag everything out of you?’

‘That’s what they said. Then they tried to lure me down into the dark underground prison where Isabel had died. I ran away.’

‘You did the right thing.’

Ana had prepared a reward for Julietta. She gave her a pretty necklace and a shimmering silk blouse. Julietta curtseyed.

‘You may go now,’ said Ana. ‘Tell the chauffeur I’ll be down shortly.’

Julietta remained standing where she was. Ana realized immediately what she wanted.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re never going to be allowed to work in the brothel with the other women. Go now, before I take back what I’ve just given you!’

Julietta left. Ana put on her black clothes, the same ones as she had worn at Senhor Vaz’s funeral. Once again she was going to accompany a person to her grave, someone who had died quite unexpectedly. Unlike Senhor Vaz’s funeral, Ana would be the only white person among the mourners. And any whites who saw her would become even more antagonistic towards her, more adamant in what in many cases had already become their hatred of her. She was not only concerned about the welfare of blacks who were alive, but she also accompanied a convicted murderess to her grave.

She was unsure about black people’s burial rituals, but she picked a few red flowers from her garden and sat down in the car. The chauffeur gave a start when he heard that he was being asked to drive her to the cemetery. He knows, she thought. He knows it’s now time for Isabel to be buried.

A new wall was being built at the entrance to the cemetery. When Ana got out of the car the black workers paused and stared at her with bricks and trowels in their hands. She stood in the shade of a tree and told the chauffeur to ask when Moses and the rest of the family were due to arrive with Isabel’s body. She watched him asking one of the bricklayers, and could see that the reply he received surprised him. He hurried back to her.

‘They have already arrived,’ he said. ‘They are waiting inside the cemetery.’

‘Waiting for whom?’

‘Waiting for you, Senhora.’

Moses, she thought as she hurried into the cemetery, the red flowers in her hand. He knew that I wouldn’t allow Isabel to be buried without my being present at the ceremony.

The chauffeur pointed out a part of the cemetery separate from the graves of white people, where a group of blacks were waiting. As she hurried along past the crumbling gravestones she detected a sort of sweetish smell of dead bodies rising up from the earth. She held her hand over her mouth, and was afraid that she would feel so sick that she would throw up.

The coffin was brown, made of rough planks. It had already been lowered into the grave. Standing round it were Moses in his overalls, Isabel’s children and several black women Ana had never seen before. She assumed they were Isabel’s sisters who were now looking after the orphaned children. There was no priest from the cathedral present. When she reached the grave, Moses led the mourners in the singing of a hymn. Everybody joined in, singing in harmony. Afterwards Moses mumbled a few words that Ana couldn’t understand, then looked at Ana.

‘Would you like to say something?’

‘No.’

Moses nodded, then began shovelling soil down over the coffin. All the others joined in to help. They dug with their hands, or with sticks and flat stones. Ana had the impression that they were in a great hurry. The coffin should be covered over as quickly as possible. She remembered something Senhor Vaz had said, about black people always wanting to get away from burials as quickly as possible because they were afraid that evil spirits would escape from the coffin and chase after them. Could it be that despite everything, Isabel was regarded above all as an evil, obsessed murderess, even by her own sisters? Ana placed her red flowers on the heap of earth on top of the grave. Then she saw that what she had heard was true: everyone apart from Moses scuttled away from the grave. Some of them jumped back and forth between the paths as if to confuse the evil spirits they were afraid might be following them. It looked so odd that she found it hard not to burst out laughing, despite her deep sorrow.

In the end there was only Moses and herself left.

‘What happens now?’ she asked.

‘I go back to the mines.’

‘But surely you could stay here? I still have the money I’d saved to try to get Isabel set free.’

Moses looked at her.

‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘You can build a house, and look after Isabel’s children. You don’t need to toil in the mines any more.’

Did he believe her? She couldn’t be sure. But in any case he said no.

‘I can’t take your money.’

‘Why not?’

‘Isabel wouldn’t have wanted me to. Her children are well looked after as it is.’

‘As I understand it you have been working for many years in the smoke and dust in the mines — it’s not good to work for too long in those conditions.’

‘But that is where I’m at home.’

She could sense that he was a little bit hesitant even so.

‘I shall think about what you have said,’ he said. ‘I’ll come to your house tomorrow, when I’ve finished thinking.’

He turned on his heel and hurried off along the paths between all the unmarked graves. She watched him until he came to the white mauseleums, then vanished completely.

She was driven back to town and asked the chauffeur to stop at the brothel, but just before they got there she changed her mind and told him to drive her home. She still didn’t know what she ought to say. Isabel’s death and her meeting with Moses had increased her feeling of being totally absorbed by herself and her own thoughts.

After taking a bath, she lay down on her bed. Over and over again she relived the long journey that had eventually taken her to the room where she was now lying. But the images inside her head were jumbled up haphazardly. Now it was Senhor Vaz she had married in Algiers, and Lundmark she had met in the brothel. Moses was her bouncer, and O’Neill was dressed as Father Leopoldo in the shadowy cathedral.

The rest of the day and the evening was spent in the borderland between dreams and consciousness. She changed into a dressing gown when Julietta brought her a tray of food, but hardly touched the food on the plate. She occasionally opened her diary, and picked up her pen in order to make an entry: but in the end she wrote nothing at all. She merely drew a map of the river that was flowing inside her head, the mountains decked in white, and the house where her father seemed to spend all his time filling the gaps and cracks so that they could endure the never-ending cold of yet another winter.

After taking another large dose of sleeping tablets she managed to fall asleep. But all the time she dreamt that she was awake. Or at least that’s how it felt when she eventually woke up.